Benjamin West, John Galt, and the biography of 1816

This essay developed from a talk delivered at the College Art Association annual meeting in 2003. I appreciated the opportunity to present the work in a non-Americanist context and thank session chair Elizabeth Childs for her suggestions on that early version. Perry Chapman's interest in historiography and artists' self-representation spurred me to complete the article sooner than I might otherwise have done, and I am grateful to Paul Staiti and an anonymous reader for timely suggestions in the process. Sherry Smith made an important contribution as well. Finally, I would have had difficulty meeting my deadlines without enthusiastic research assistance from Stephen Mark Caffey, who knows as much about West as I do.

Notes

1. Dunlap, vol. 1, 34. In addition to his work as a historian and biographer, Dunlap was a painter, dramatist, theater manager, and novelist.

2. James Thomas Flexner, America's Old Masters, rev. ed. (1939; New York: Dover, 1967), 74. Those designated "old masters" were West, John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, and Gilbert Stuart. Flexner manifestly aligned himself with Dunlap in the introduction he composed for the 1969 edition of Dunlap's History.

3. See the historiographic essay by Carrie Rebora, "Copley and Art History: The Study of America's First Old Master," in Carrie Rebora. Paul Staiti et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995), 3-23.

4. Publie Advertiser, Apr. 23, 1764, published an anonymous poem dedicated to "Mr. West, a celebrated painter ... known in Italy by the name of the American Raphael"--though its effusive praise prompted a reply (May 2, 1764) pronouncing that title merely ironic until such time as West proved himself with "more striking Performances." Still, the characterization endured as a compliment, not an embarrassment--at least not one sensed by West, who gave his first child the name Raphael.

5. Each of Reynolds's discourses was published on completion. The first seven appeared together in 1778 and the complete edition of fifteen in 1797, five years after the artist's death (but prepared by Reynolds and his friend and executor Edmond Malone). The standard modern edition is Sir Joshua Reynolds: Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (New Haven: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1975).

6. References to West as "father" were once common; he is described as "dean" and "mentor" in Holger Cahill and Alfred H. Barr Jr., eds., Art in America (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1934), 20, 22.

7. See Susan Rather, "A Painter's Progress: Matthew Pratt and The American School," Metropolitan Muscum of Art Journal 28 (1993): 169-83. Dorinda Evans, Benjamin West and His American Students (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Portrait Gallery, 1980) is the standard survey of that subject, focused on the American students identified in Dunlap's History.