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Benjamin West, John Galt, and the biography of 1816
Art Bulletin, The, June, 2004 by Susan Rather
[FIGURE 6 OMITTED]
During the visit to Sicily, the writer acquired material for his first publication expressly concerned with art, for Philosophical Magazine (a journal edited by his new father-in-law, Alexander Tilloch) in 1813: "On the Fine Arts: An Essay founded on a Discourse delivered by the Cavaliere Ferro e Ferro, President of the Accademia del Decernimento of Trapani.* By Mr. John Galt." (64) Galt's contribution to the treatise is unclear, as it would often be in his publications. The note to the title stated that the "original Italian work, consisting of two volumes quarto, containing four discourses by Sig. Ferro, was not printed for sale, but was circulated gratuitously among the Author's friends"; however, passages on English architecture, the "Elgin marbles," and poet Robert Southey indicate that the essay is not merely a translation. Galt was franker about his hand in the work when he expanded on the same putative base in Letters from the Levant (1813), his second collection of travel essays. Letter 26 (dated in Athens) presents, he writes, a distillation of the same discourses interspersed with his own ideas, now clearly including the remarks on English poetry, "something complimentary and national, in case your [the reader's] patience has been worn out." (65)
Letters from the Levant offers the earliest evidence of Galt's acquaintance with West. To justify including his own opinions on fine art in that volume, he declared in its preface: "they have been printed in consequence of the approbation with which Mr. West, unquestionably the greatest artist of the age, was pleased to notice a few observations on the same subject, which the Author has elsewhere published" (presumably the Philosophical Magazine essay). (66) If this marked the beginning of a dialogue between the two men, it was an opportune moment for both. After terrible reviews for a volume of blank-verse tragedy, published in 1812, Galt's Life and Administration of Cardinal Wolsey, also of 1812, had been more favorably received, with good sales of the biography adding a concrete boost to his perennially shaky finances. (67) Galt must have been casting about for another biographical subject, and he soon found one who would spare him the time and expense of research (no longer feasible after his marriage in April 1813) and whose connections might do him good. In April 1814. New Monthly Magazine announced that Galt was "engaged upon a life of the venerable President of the Royal Academy ... under the immediate superintendance of Mr. West himself." (68) West had biography in mind as well, following the publication in 1813 of painter James Northcote's Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Rushed into print to coincide with the British Institution retrospective, the book intensified the spotlight on Reynolds, but few considered the rambling memoir by Reynolds's former pupil a success. West and his friends pronounced the book "vulgar" and full of inappropriate and undigested material; irked reviewers saw a momentous life--whose history was, "so far as it extends, the history of the modern English school of painting"--reduced by an undiscerning author to a "trifling," "dull," "hackneyed" "bundle of bon mots." (69) "We shall have to lament that Sir Joshua Reynolds was not also his own biographer," ventured one critic, who concluded that "a life self-written, and commented upon afterwards by an impartial acquaintance, would be the most perfect piece of biography." (70)
