Featured White Papers
- Enterprise PBX comparison guide (VoIP-News)
- 5 Strategies for Making Sales the Engine for Growth (AchieveGlobal)
- Hosted CRM buyer's guide (Inside CRM)
Content provided in partnership with
Benjamin West, John Galt, and the biography of 1816
Art Bulletin, The, June, 2004 by Susan Rather
North American Review saw the matter a bit differently, objecting to the "style" of narration in the biography, its "appearance of inflated vanity." Expressions that the writer considered "only justice" were West deceased seemed "misplaced" during the artist's lifetime, "apt to implicate him in Mr. Galt's want of taste." (107) An epigraph on the subject of puffery opened Port Folio's review in January 1817, dialogue drawn from Richard Brinsley Sheridan's 1779 play The Critic: "And do you think there are any who are influenced by this? Oh lud! Yes, sir!--the number of those who undergo the fatigue of judging for themselves is very small indeed." (108) Judging, the American reviewer continued, is nearly impossible: "There is something in the fortunes of Mr. West so peculiar, that credulity readily seizes the sceptre, because reason is almost unable to accompany his rapid career to wealth and fame." (109) Galt's book, in short, would have certain impact on how people remembered West--or came to know him in the first place. With a sense of humor and only a little impatience, the reviewer dismissed a few episodes from the biography. The story of a minister who predicted West's fame at his birth was "really too ridiculous to claim our attention." A minor detail about provisions left for nocturnal wayfarers by the boy's innkeeper-father betrayed the author's unfamiliarity with Quaker customs (they never did practice "such prodigal benevolence") as well as the subject's "fond and romantic enthusiasm" for days of his youth. Port Folio teased West lightly on other points. The artist's negative opinion of New York, formed in the course of a painting trip during his youth, showed that he "is still a Philadelphian." His effort to capture the nocturnal effect of a Flemish picture by placing his model in a dark closet with candle in hand demonstrated that "genius, though often baffled, is never overcome." If Galt's book "drops the curtain" at the point of West's departure for England, the reviewer does not. He concluded by relating how West, years earlier during the Revolution, expressed regret for an American battle loss while in the presence of George III. West, it seemed, had been reclaimed as an American.
Nearly two decades after it first appeared, Galt's life of West was absorbed into the history of American art, through the long biography devoted to him in Dunlap's History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States. The author, already a noted playwright and historian of the American theater, had been a student of West's during the 1780s and, intermittently, a painter himself. When Dunlap began writing his account of American art in 1832--framed as a sequence of biographies--he was deeply involved in art world politics. As a founder (1826) and vice-president (1831-38) of the National Academy of Design, Dunlap squarely opposed a more elitist organization in which he had once been active, the American Academy of the Fine Arts (established 1802). The National Academy positioned itself as the champion of working artists, with a primary goal of providing instruction that the American Academy effectively denied. Dunlap himself was named professor of historical composition by the new institution in 1832. In The History of the Arts of Design, Dunlap reserved harsh words for artists who did not offer assistance when they could, whereas he honored others whose active mentoring helped nurture American art. (110) As a teacher, West had no peers, and Dunlap could with good reason pronounce his effect on American art "incalculable."
