Benjamin West, John Galt, and the biography of 1816

Galt had a long-standing interest in the Americas. His father owned a West Indian trading ship and his brother and other relatives had immigrated to Honduras, Virginia, Vermont, and Canada. While writing West's biography, Galt worked (unsuccessfully) as a parliamentary lobbyist on behalf of Canadians who had suffered losses in the most recent war with the United States. (Galt himself later moved to Canada, in 1825, a business venture that ended in another bankruptcy and a stay in debtor's prison after his return to London in 1828.) His early publications included "A Statistical Account of Upper Canada" (1807), an anecdotal hodgepodge of secondhand information on Canadian climate, diseases, lakes, hemp cultivation, religion, and so on. Under the heading "miscellaneous considerations," Galt broadly introduced one of his enduring subjects: "the plain tales of those who, by virtue of their designs alone, have improved the conditions of mankind." Despite his nominal focus on Canada, Galt singled out "the high moral character of the Pennsylvanians even at this day ... [as] the fairest monument that wisdom and enterprise can hope to obtain." (86) As West's biographer, he gained the opportunity to focus on one exemplary and resourceful Pennsylvanian, a great man of humble beginnings, whose story neatly accommodated Galt's conception of progress as the result of providential design and human action in the everyday world. (87)

Galt's focus on West's formation and West's voice allowed him to substantially avoid critical consideration of West's art, which might have opened the writer to charges that he lacked qualifications as an artist or theorist. Galt seems also to have been sensitive to perceptions that West himself had difficulty articulating theory (as opposed to method). The limitation hardly mattered: in his preface to the 1816 volume, Galt contended that West's decision to relate

  the circumstances by which he was led to approximate, without the aid
  of an instructor, to those principles and rules of art, which it is
  the object of schools and academies to disseminate, has conferred a
  greater benefit on young Artists than he could possibly have done by
  the most ingenious and eloquent lectures on the theories of his
  profession. (88)

The compiler's role (even if only that) was hardly trifling. By serving as West's sounding board and providing structure for the old artist's recollections, Galt too had made a contribution to art and its history.

The American West

In hindsight, it is clear that the stakes in the collaboration between West and Galt, whose reputation in no way depended on this work, were all West's. He had legitimate reasons to fear the continued decline of his reputation in England and went to remarkable lengths to keep his name, work, and image in circulation--astonishingly, even using stationery engraved with his portrait (Fig. 7). With the biography, West may have hoped to persuade the British art world to read his American origins as closer to nature, a quality more valued in 1816 than academic credentials. He stood to gain even more in the United States. Fifty-six years away from his native land had limited his negative exposure there, while more than two dozen American students augmented the positive. In the role of mentor, West had done as much to nurture the development of American art as anyone.