Benjamin West, John Galt, and the biography of 1816

It appeared that this contribution might not be enough, judging from items on West published regularly in Port Folio, the influential American literary and political magazine. Founded in Philadelphia in 1801 and issued weekly until 1809, Port Folio served up a miscellany of original and reprinted essays under the direction of Joseph Dennie. Whether as "Oliver Oldschool, Esq."--the journal's imaginary editorial persona--or in other guises, Dennie and his fellow contributors conveyed a Federalist dismay over the democratic and commercial course of American society under Thomas Jefferson's presidency. Port Folio may have been elitist and Anglophilic, but its perspective remained manifestly American--as the many items on West demonstrate.

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The magazine signaled ambivalence about the famous artist in its first volume, which announced "Sir Benjamin West's" plan to donate a major painting to the Pennsylvania Hospital. West never was knighted, yet the honorific recurred in Port Folio for a decade, always in commentary that, on one level, seems disparaging. Why "this American artist, after experiencing the good fortune to be born and educated in Pennsylvania, should sullenly retreat to England" is a mystery.

  It is perfectly inexplicable, that he should barter citizenship for
  knighthood, that he should receive a king's money, and, more provoking
  still, be soothed by regal praise. What are titles, honors and gold,
  to an independent republican, who, remaining at home, might have had
  the noblest and amplest opportunities of--giving away as many pictures
  as he pleased! (89)

Port Folio's humor about the American alternative to West's illustrious English career exposes the editorial irony, apparent again in 1804:

  SIR BENJAMIN WEST, an American genius, who, most unaccountably,
  prefers the banks of the Thames to the banks of the Delaware, and
  chooses to tint historic canvas, under the patronage of his KING,
  rather than to paint sign boards for some republican major in the
  militia, or cover with Spanish brown the dead flat of some Quaker, out
  of pure brotherly love and affection. (90)

West, in other words, could hardly be faulted for staying away from a country with such restricted opportunities for painters. But why was he so persistently identified with an honorific he could not claim? The editor should not have been confused on this matter in 1805, when he reprinted the entire West biography from Universal Magazine, titled, as in the original, "Biographical Sketch of Benjamin West, Esq., President of the Royal Academy." The English text criticized the crown for failing to honor West sufficiently, not least by reward of a suitable title, but the Philadelphia editor composed an introduction that kept up the pressure on "Sir Benjamin," in "voluntary exile from his natal land" but "perhaps sigh[ing] to return to a country, free to discern and sovereign to reward merit." (91) In Port Folio's American view, as a courtier, West was a knight, whether or not he had actually been granted a title.