Benjamin West, John Galt, and the biography of 1816

8. James Northcote, Conversations of James Northcate R.A. with James Ward on Art and Artists, ed. Ernest Fletcher (London: Methuen, 1901), 153-54. Northcote (who was usually quite critical of West) implicitly contrasted West's teaching with that of his own instructor, Joshua Reynolds, whom Northcote thought "a very bad master in Art"; Northcote, quoted in Charles Robert Leslie and Tom Taylor, Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds with Notices of Some of His Contemporaries, 2 vols. (London, 1865). vol, 1, 418. Not everyone considered West's adherence to rules an asset: for one of the most damning characterizations, see William Hazlitt, "On the Old Age of Artists." essay 9 of The Plain Speaker: Opinions on Books, Men and Things (1826), in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: J. M. Dent, 1930-34). vol. 12, 94-95. The number of West's English students must have been substantial, given John Thomas Smith's assertion (however exaggerated) that there were "very few artists now basking in the sunshine of patronage who have not benefited essentially by [West's] generous and able communications." Smith, briefly among those students, became keeper of prints at the British Museum and an astute chronicler of the London art scene; Smith, Nollekens and His Times, 2 vols. (London, 1828), vol. 2, 369.

9. "'I have seen them often,' added he, 'standing in that very attitude, and pursuing, with an intense eye, the arrow which they had just discharged from the bow'"; Galt, 1816, 105-6. The claim is surely a fabrication. Few Indians remained in eastern Pennsylvania after 1740; those who did lived much as their poorest neigh boring colonists; and Mohawk territory occupied the New York region, not Pennsylvania. Such connections, moreover, were commonplace in the 18th century; extended comparison between an Indian warrior and the Apollo Belvedere occurs in [John Shebbeare], Lydia, or Filial Piety: A Novel, 2 vols. (1755; reprint, New York: Garland, 1974), vol. 1, 3-4.

10. John Galt, Letters from the Levant; Containing Views of the State of Society, Manners, Opinions, and Commerce, in Greece, and Several of the Principal Islands of the Archipelago (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1813), 181, 218.

11. Ann Abrams has unraveled some of the more improbable yarns in Galt, while considering their importance to the narrative of West's career, in "John Galt and the Legendary Origins of Benjamin West." chap. 2 of The Valiant Hero: Benjamin West and Grand Style History Painting (Washington. D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985), 31-43. See also Alberts, app. 1, "John Galt's Biography of West as a Source," 409-12.

12. Although a complete English edition of Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists (1550) did not appear until 1850, many biographical accounts of artists drew on that source. Galt, in any case, was a practiced translator of Italian. The classic study of biographical themes in artists' lives, from antiquity and the Renaissance, is Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment (1934), rev. ed., trans. Alastair Laing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). Petra ten-Doesschate Chu focused on later. French examples in "Family Matters: The Construction of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century Artists' Biographies," in Marilyn R. Brown, ed., Picturing Children: Constructions of Childhood between Rousseau and Frend (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2002), 58-70.