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Benjamin West, John Galt, and the biography of 1816
Art Bulletin, The, June, 2004 by Susan Rather
Precisely when biographer and subject first became acquainted remains unclear. Galt was forty-one years younger, born in 1779 in western Scotland and raised in Greenock, the port city of Glasgow. He became a customs house clerk at sixteen and soon thereafter joined a merchant firm; business engaged him intermittently throughout his life, with consistently poor results. Galt's interest in writing emerged early, marked from the first by experimentation with diverse genres--poetry, plays, biography, essays, novels--and by an "ominous facility of output," in biographer Ian Gordon's apt phrase. (62) Encouraged by the publication of a few works in Scottish newspapers and journals and hoping to expand his business prospects, Galt moved to London in 1804. A decade later, he was still floundering, with one commercial bankruptcy behind him and no better than marginal success as a writer. At the same point in life West, by contrast, had become famous.
Galt's earliest published remarks on the subject of art appear in two books of essays and an article based on his travels in the Mediterranean. In each case, a business venture in Gibraltar gave way to an extended tour, the first intermittently in the company of Lord Byron, whom Galt met en route (and later made the subject of a biography). Each tour resulted in a volume printed at the author's expense by the London firm of Cadell and Davies. Galt's few pages on painting in Voyages and Travels in the Years 1809, 1810, and 1811 (1812) express a conventional belief in the primacy of nature; the old masters in the royal collection at Palermo, Sicily, attracted him because they did not try to surpass nature, unlike "the artists of the English Academy" (unspecified), who "have much to unlearn." Next, admitting a "shocking disregard of keeping" (that is, customary standards). Galt makes a conceptual leap from "the master-pieces of the Italian artists to the Barbers' signs of Palermo," an association he defends as "natural" because the latter were also "pictures." Galt did not invoke signboards to subvert the old masters, as had Hogarth fifty years before. Instead, as a writer whose works are suffused with the Scottish Enlightenment concern for social evolution and for whom progress would be a constant theme, he may have regarded the signboards as representing a relatively primitive stage in the development of painting that in Sicily coexisted with more mature manifestations. Artists of humble beginnings might, under such circumstances, make accelerated individual progress. Galt offers the example of a shoemaker's son from Trapani ("the fourth city in Sicily") who was "permitted to indulge the invincible propensity of his genius" only after he had "spoiled a great deal of leather by scratching figures on it with an awl." By the time of Galt's writing, the distracted apprentice had become one of "the most eminent" living painters, creating works in Rome deemed "little inferior to Raphael." (63) The story of irrepressible genius, a well-established convention, anticipates Galt's more sustained engagement with artistic beginnings in The Life of West.
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