Benjamin West, John Galt, and the biography of 1816

Dunlap composed West's biography at the very start of his writing process, making it the foundation and touchstone for all that followed in The History of the Arts of Design. (111) Though profiles of eight painters precede West's, Dunlap's initial assertion that West was "indigenous" immediately set him apart. The distinction meant something more than "born here," since the author had already indicated that Nathaniel Smibert was "born and died in America." (112) For Dunlap, West exemplified qualities of virtue, industry, and talent, which the first pages of his book emphatically defined as the only criteria of personal superiority in the United States. Never mind that West was a British courtier and never lived in the independent United States; he lived by American principles, absorbed from American soil, where "from the very first settlement of this country, the germs of republican equality were planted." (113) Without Galt's Life of West, Dunlap would have been challenged to develop a credible profile of West as an "indigenous" artist. He collected much of his information by surveying his subjects and persons who knew them, and West had died over a decade before the project began. The many students who contributed recollections of their mentor apparently did so without commenting on Galt's version of West's American life--perhaps as much from reluctance to challenge his authorized biographer as from lack of information. Dunlap, however, had no qualms about doing so and, unlike English reviewers, blamed the more "absurd tales" in Galt's volume not on West himself but on the "most injudicious biographer." Expressing "hope" that he could "separate the poetry from the facts," Dunlap mined the biography for both, thereby perpetuating even those incidents he was inclined to deny. (114)

Dunlap concluded his narrative of West's life on a curiously defensive note, as if a credible case for the artist's superiority depended on acknowledgment of the contrary position. But he let others state the problem. In Britain, West

  is unsparingly censured where he fails, and is allowed little credit
  where he has succeeded. He is tried, not by his merits, but by his
  defects, and judged before a tribunal which admits only evidence
  against him .... few artists have been less favoured by fortune, or
  more ungenerously defrauded of their fame.

That assessment came from Sir Martin Archer Shee, the Royal Academy president in 1834, whose defense of West takes up the last five, uninterrupted pages of Dunlap's profile of the artist. "Who will hesitate to acknowledge," Shee asked finally, that West "... well merits to be considered, in his peculiar department [history], the most distinguished artist of the age in which he lived?" The question completes the body of Dunlap's text on West. Rather than allowing it to resonate with the reader, Dunlap added a curious footnote, in which he gave Sir George Beaumont, West's longtime patron and supporter, the last, dispiriting words: "'I am ashamed of the recent ungrateful neglect of my countrymen,--it surprised and grieved me.'" (115) By highlighting British negativity at the conclusion of West's biography, Dunlap implicitly challenged Americans to do the right thing by honoring West, following his own example in The History of the Arts of Design, as founding father of the American painting tradition. (116)