Benjamin West, John Galt, and the biography of 1816

Susan Rather

"Incalculable" was William Dunlap's estimation of Benjamin West's effect on American art. In his History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States (1834), he lionized West as the first internationally famous, Americanborn painter and a committed teacher of American artists. (1) A century after that ambitious first chronicle of American artists, James Thomas Flexner tried to cement the identification in America's Old Masters (1939). West, he proclaimed, was "incontrovertibly the father of American painting." (2) Flexner's defensive tone suggests a complication, which Dunlap implicitly confronted in his first sentence on West, a flat declaration that the painter was "indigenous." The trajectory of West's career has always made his distinction as an American problematic. Unlike John Singleton Copley, the exact contemporary whose twenty-year career in Boston established him as the premier painter in colonial British America. West (1738-1820) came to artistic maturity only after departing the colonies in 1760. Copley eventually moved to England himself--a relocation sometimes judged as abandonment, given its timing on the eve of revolution and the artist's marital alliance with a staunchly loyalist family. (3) Still, Copley left behind a compelling body of work: hundreds of portraits that vividly captured prosperous Americans on the threshold of independence. West's American portraits, by contrast, offer little more than wan effigies of his fellow Pennsylvanians. Yet West and his patrons had the audacity to believe he could accomplish something more. In 1760, at age twenty-one, he left home for Europe, the first American artist to travel abroad for study.

Three years in Italy radically altered West's prospects. Through fortunate connections, application, and ingenuity, he acquired the social and cultural polishing necessary to position himself within an emerging British artistic elite. By 1763, he was in London, prepared to capitalize on his Italian experience (still unusual for British artists) and to gamble on his novelty as the "American Raphael." (4) Against expectations, West presented himself as a history painter. Though portraitists alone attracted steady work, theirs was a genre debased in art theory by its mimetic constraints, whereas historical subjects, summoned by intellect and imagination, dignified their makers as learned practitioners of a liberal art. Such academic concerns consumed the artists in West's metropolitan circle founders in 1768 of the Royal Academy of Arts. The institution's first president. Sir Joshua Reynolds, made a vigorous case for history painting in his influential "discourses," fifteen lectures on the theory and practice of art delivered between 1769 and 1790 and quickly published. (5) Ironically, portrait painting sustained Reynolds's own career. It was, instead, the American-born West who broke the mold of the English face painter. He won lasting fame with a subject from modern history, The Death of General Wolfe (1770)--representing the fallen hero at a decisive moment in the British conquest of Canada--and he gained an invaluable marketing tool in the fine reproductive engraving by William Woollett (1776), which realized huge sums for publisher John Boydell, Woollett, and West himself (Fig. 1). Most importantly, The Death of Wolfe secured the attention of George III, who commissioned a copy and later provided West with steady employment, allowing the artist to call himself "Historical Painter to the King"--the first to gain that distinction. West's election as second president of the Royal Academy, after Reynolds's death in 1792, was a foregone conclusion. In one of West's two self-portraits commemorating that achievement, a laurel-crowned bust of the king gazes in imperious profile toward the new president, who sits with upright dignity in his official chair (Fig. 2). The artist grasps a paper marked with the royal command of 1768, by which the academy was constituted (suggesting his instrumental role in winning the king's patronage), while books inscribed "Bible" and "History of England" evoke the subject matter of West's paintings for Windsor Castle. The work summarized West's accomplishments; the royal privilege and professional rank that situated him, by 1792, as far as he could possibly have been from his modest American origins.

Throughout fifty-seven productive years in England, West never set foot in his homeland again. How is it, then, that he came to be regarded as "father," "dean," or "mentor" of American painting? (6) The words affirm his crucial role, sustained over more than half a century, in training American artists. Matthew Pratt, the first of West's countrymen to seek his counsel, anticipated that legacy in a painting of 1765 that shows West (standing) advising a group of artists, each engaged in a different stage of the pedagogical process (Fig. 3). Since only Pratt (who appears seated at the easel) can be documented in West's London studio at the time, the work must project an ideal, a collectivity clearly defined by the title: The American School. (7) West had English students, but they neither sought to define nor attracted a group identity; however, even those who did not study with him recognized West as "the best possible teacher," because he "did everything by rule." (8) For Americans with few alternatives at home. West presided over a de facto American academy, giving a critical boost to painting in the new republic and earning a place at its head.

Of equal, if not greater, importance to his identification as American was the very different image summoned by West's youth in Pennsylvania: the artist as unschooled, natural talent. This character was West's to fashion, unconstrained by the public record of his career in London, but he did not do it alone. John Galt--a Scottish professional writer with demonstrated interest in the arts and in biography--served as the painter's collaborator and the author of record for The Life and Studies of Benjamin West, Esq., President of the Royal Academy in London, Prior to his Arrival in England, compiled from materials furnished by himself (1816). The impact of this account on the historical picture of West, notwithstanding its mythicized portrayal of the artist's early life, cannot be underestimated. Galt's narrative cohered around the representation of West as an artist who acquired art artlessly. As a young child, this prodigy sketched a portrait of his infant niece in the cradle, to the amazement of his family. He resourcefully fashioned a brush using hair from his cat's tail, while his mother and accommodating Indians provided the fledgling painter with a rudimentary palette of primary colors. Astonished by the image of cows projected on a wall through his bedroom shutter, he stumbled on the principles of the camera obscura, a tool for reproducing nature previously unknown to him, which, in Galt's account, West then managed to "invent." He admired the truthfulness of landscapes painted by an unschooled artist, who became his first teacher. West eventually enlarged his sights with the guidance of modest fellow provincials: a governess who instructed the boy in ancient history and poetry and a gunsmith who urged West to look beyond portraiture to history painting, thereby licensing him to focus on a genre never fully accepted by Americans. West arrived in Italy with his American innocence intact. A curious and worldly crowd assembled to observe the young artist's first sight of the Apollo Belvedere, the celebrated ancient statue. West did not disappoint them; in a flash of recognition, according to Galt, he exclaimed: "My God, how like it is to a young Mohawk warrior!" (9) It seems unlikely that West had ever seen a Mohawk or any other Indian warrior, and his response was overdetermined, plotted in advance, perhaps, and surely embellished later.

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Galt's prefatory characterization of The Life of West as the artist's "memoirs" relieved him of the obligation to verify his subject's recollections, but he would not have wished to do so in any case. Galt valued the interaction of imagination and memory. In 1813 he proposed that "their united endeavor to supply what has been forgotten, begets reflections with the character of truth about them, such as the offspring of fancy never possesses; and with more beauty, no less interesting than the hard features of veteran and serviceable facts." (10) I, too, am largely unconcerned with establishing the historical veracity of incidents related in West's biography (a project other scholars have undertaken selectively), and this essay does not offer extended analyses of that text. (11) Nor will I catalogue the biographical motifs that Galt's Life of West shares with other accounts of artists' lives, especially those in Vasari. (12) Instead, I explore completely overlooked questions of motivation, in the belief that assessments of West's purpose in relating his story and Galt's in composing it are fundamental to understanding the form and content of this influential account.

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Perhaps such questions have seemed difficult to raise about an indispensable source of information for West's youth, despite the transparent fable it presents. In Galt's account, nature inspired West and served as his true teacher. The writer underscored the point in a remark following his account of how West was taught by Indians to make paints: "The mythologies of antiquity furnish no allegory more beautiful; and a Painter who would embody the metaphor of an Artist instructed by Nature, could scarcely imagine any thing more picturesque than the real incident of the Indians instructing West to prepare the prismatic colours." (13) Galt's story of the American innocent had a powerful, if curiously underac knowledged, effect on West's reputation, rehabilitating him as an American artist. That may not have been precisely, or at any rate wholeheartedly, West's intent. Over the course of his professional life, his readiness to be considered American proved inconsistent. Publicly, and for good reason, he was capable of nearly complete denial, a posture laid bare in the pre-Galt biographical accounts that West endorsed. This essay explores his apparent change of heart and the role in that turnabout played by a writer who was, it appears, something more than an amanuensis to the famous artist.

An Insistent Englishman

Lucky timing, modest talent, and nerve: these were West's advantages at the outset of his career in England. For a while it seemed possible to believe that West--heralded as a "long expected, wish'd for Stranger"--might become "a great Painter, the first in his walk our Country [that is, Great Britain] has produced." (14) The bar was not set terribly high. As one writer acknowledged in 1773, simply being "one of our first History Painters" qualified West as "one of our first Painters: for History Painting is universally acknowledged to be the noblest branch of the art." (15) By 1788, though few could deny that West had "dedicated [his] life, to inform future times of the heighth of the British School of History," the durability of his reputation as a painter seemed in question. (16) Even so, his privileged relationship with George III kept West at the forefront of British art, his stature greatly augmented by his unanimous election to head the Royal Academy in 1792.

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West's prominence made him a ready target. In "Ode to the Academic Chair, on the Election of Mr. West to the Presidency," the satirist "Peter Pindar" (John Wolcot) took aim at both king and painter:

  I like West's works--he beats the Raphael school--
  I never like'd that Reynolds--'twas a fool--
  Painted too thick--a dauber--'twon't, 'twon't pass--
  West, West, West's pictures are smooth as glass:
  Besides, I hated Reynolds, from my heart
  He thought that I knew naught about the art.
  West tells me that my taste is very pure--
  That I'm a connoisseur, a connoisseur:
  I like, I like, I like the works of West. (17)

The stammering speech, susceptibility to flattery, and lack of visual sophistication attributed to George III in this characterization only matched the king to his favored painter, whom Pindar had often portrayed as a vain bumbler. In 1783, he offered a mock apology for previous insults to West, "our Yankey painter," whose thirst for praise could barely be quenched:

  Don't be cast down--instead of gall
  Molasses from my pen shall fall:
  And yet, I fear thy gullet it is such,
  That could I pour Niagara down,
  Were Niagara praise, thou wouldst not frown.
  Nor think the thund' ring gulf one drop too much. (18)

Such satires represent an extreme of judgments that others shared; even friends thought West's opinion of himself immodestly high. (19) He certainly did not constrain his ambitions. After he became Royal Academy president, West declined the knighthood bestowed on his predecessor, because he hoped for a hereditary title and income, a wish never fulfilled. (20) If that decision affected no one but West, other demonstrations of his ample self-regard were more broadly injurious. West openly promoted a book praising himself alone among modern artists, the Rev. Robert Bromley's Philosophical and Critical History of the Fine Arts, and some believed he stood behind Bromley's cutting characterization of Copley as "a painter from America who, before his arrival in this country, had sent hither a squirrel as the harbinger of his fame." (21) Over the course of another dozen years, West made a series of professional blunders that angered his colleagues and raised grave questions about his competence. He was, for example, the most prominent among a group of artists duped by a swindler peddling the so-called Venetian secret, which promised to unlock the mystery of the coloring so admired in sixteenth-century Venetian painting. Then, in 1803, West was charged with an attempted violation of the Royal Academy's rule that a work, once exhibited at the institution's annual exhibition, could not be shown again. Though the president countered that he had substantially reworked Hagar and Ishmael, his submission for that year's show, his failure to paint out the original signature and date, 1776, suggested otherwise. Copley, at the head of the hanging committee, had a history of opposing West, and he did not hold back in this matter or in the broader, ongoing power struggle within the academy that often pitted the two Americans against one another.

In the midst of this crisis of confidence, West's thoughts turned to his homeland. He confided to his close friend Joseph Farington, the prolific diarist, that "were He 10 years younger He wd. go to America, where He was sure that much might be done as the people had a strong disposition to the Arts." (22) Having attracted talented young American painters to his London studio over the course of four decades gave West confidence that art would eventually flourish in the land of his birth; "the people there have a genius for the arts," he declared in 1807. (23) Yet it seems he never seriously entertained the idea of presiding over that development from within the United States, held back in England by considerations of family and financial security.

For most of his long career, moreover, West publicly withheld details of his American formation, perhaps believing them irrelevant or even detrimental to the construction of his reputation as a gentleman artist. The first published magazine article about West, in European Magazine and London Review in 1794, noted simply that he was "by birth an American," adding: "we have not learnt under whom he received the rudiments of his Art, nor to whom he was obliged for the direction of his studies." (24) Only West could have provided such information, and he chose not to do so. A briefer profile in The Beauties of the Royal Palaces (more widely known as The Windsor Guide) offered specifics about West's birthplace ("Springfield, Chester County, Pennsylvania, in America"). but little more information on his training: "Mr. West's love for painting, shewed itself at an early age; at sixteen, with the consent of his parents and friends, he embraced it as a profession. In 1760, he left for Italy." (25) Essentially the same sentence was repeated in two accounts of 1805, in Universal Magazine and Public Characlers (a biographical annual). The latter added that West painted both portraits and historical pictures "with considerable success" in the American colonies, employment that made possible his sojourn abroad. By contrast, these articles, and one further profile of the artist in another London-based journal, La Belle Assemblee (1808), paid more attention to West's European study, then generally accepted as important to a British artist's education. (26) None related the episode that so strikingly evoked West's American origins--his encounter with the Apollo Belvedere--although West himself had told the story in a public address at the Royal Academy, in 1794. (27)

These early biographies consistently underplay West's Americanness while amplifying his identity as a Briton. All four attest to West's English bloodline, through his father (born in England) and maternal grandparents (who immigrated with other Quakers to Pennsylvania) back to Lord Delawarre, a nobleman distinguished in the fourteenth century for military service under Edward III. (28) More broadly, each account situated West prominently within the generation of artists represented as having overcome impediments to the flowering of the arts in Britain, most notably, its commercial preoccupations. If trade fueled selfish desires and suppressed or encouraged the wrong kind of art, its pernicious effects might be tempered by an art promoting public responsibility, especially historical subjects. This was a well-rehearsed argument among eighteenth-century artists and commentators who struggled to negotiate the role of the fine arts in commercial society. For the nineteenth-century author of West's Public Characters biography, however, art and trade were not at odds.

  The country which supplied all Europe with many of the luxuries, and
  most of the conveniences of life, whose merchandize occupied an extent
  unequalled by any other nation on the globe, was now about to add to
  her other means of wealth a new source of commerce, and, along with
  her hardware, her woollens, and broad cloaths, to traffic in pictures
  and engravings with those countries from which she had so long
  contented to be supplied. To the politician and the oeconomist, who
  question the influence and use of the fine arts in society, and who
  allege that they lock up a great portion of the wealth of the country
  in mouldering and unproductive canvas, it will be sufficient answer to
  refer them to the receipts and entries at the custom-house: they will
  there find what a channel of commerce has been opened to other
  countries, and what a prodigious saving has accrued to our own. (29)

West, the writer continued, was the outstanding model of artistic productivity, with an oeuvre having "no parallel in the annals of painting, if we consider the number, size, and extent of their composition in figures, and their great diversity in matter." (In demonstration of this assertion, the essay concluded with a "correct catalogue" of West's paintings in ten numbing pages of small print.) (30) Engravings of West's history paintings, furthermore, "were spread by a commercial intercourse through the civilized world," facilitated by the market in performing the most exalted function of art: to instruct "mankind in honourable and virtuous deeds." Honor, in turn, accrued to both artist and country. As the final paragraph assured, desire to be "worthy of the distinction of his Sovereign's notice" and "to fulfill his duty as a faithful subject to the British constitution" motivated West's life.

Such expressions of allegiance might be regarded as merely conventional if West were unimpeachably English, but his American birth interfered with that perception. George III underscored the distinction when, in 1805, he vented his frustration with the quarreling royal academicians to William Beechey (an artist the king briefly favored over West): "West is an American, so is Copley, and you are an Englishman, & if you were all at the Devil, I wd. Not enquire after you." (31) Anxiety that Britons, in general, did not hold West in sufficient regard lay close to the surface of the "Biographical Sketch of Benjamin West" that appeared in the May 1805 issue of Universal Magazine. The portentous first page of text does not mention the artist, whose engraved image floats within an oval frame on the facing page. Instead, the author expounds on the importance of fine art in shaping nations, the need to compete "in arts as much as in arms" with Britain's French "enemy," and on the debt Britain owed its artists "for increasing its wealth, and enhancing its honour and reputation. Among these [we read at the turn of the page], and at the head of them all stands Benjamin West." (32) The customary assertions of his prolific output follow, with assurances that even the works of Michelangelo and Titian, both long-lived artists, hardly "bore any proportion in number" to those of West. The immediate purpose of this strained valuation of quantity over quality, it appears, was to demonstrate that West had little motivation to "disguise" the picture he had reworked and resubmitted for exhibition at the Royal Academy two years earlier. How gravely that miscalculation wounded the artist is fully exposed in the well-rehearsed defense of his actions and heavy-handed condemnation of his critics, which precede any biographical details. That account, once initiated, breaks for a long paragraph lauding West's service and value to king and country, both represented as insufficiently appreciative. An implicit rebuke to such mistreatment follows in a passage touting the professional regard shown West during his trip to Paris in 1802, together with the text, in French, of a celebratory poem addressed to West during an official dinner in France. Any suggestion that West enjoyed a cozy relationship with the French played a dangerous game. Only a decade earlier the artist had come under suspicion as a "democrat" sympathetic to the French revolutionaries and their American allies, which temporarily lost him favor with the king. If the article in Universal Magazine had the purpose of bolstering West's position in Britain, then it was rife with missteps, which expose West's sense of embattlement and his tone deafness to critics. Nothing could contain his professional slide. In June 1805, West received instructions to discontinue his paintings for the Chapel of Revealed Religion at Windsor Castle, and in December of that year, he resigned his presidency of the Royal Academy. Though eventually returned to the chair, West suffered a more grievous loss to his pride and well-being in 1810. No longer protected by the mentally incapacitated George III, West was, finally, stripped of his income and position as the king's history painter.

West's stipend had kept him in England when he might otherwise have returned to the United States--so thought Farington, who added, "West certainly has not an English mind." (33) The conjunction is revealing. A widespread perception that Americans were obsessed with money adhered easily to both West and Copley, whose concern with making money--and success in doing so--was quite undisguised. Satirist "Anthony Pasquin" (John Williams), the American painters' most relentless and public critic, kept the charges alive in publications spanning two decades. "To talk of any man possessing genius, who is so immoderately fond of money, is preposterous," he wrote of Copley, in Memoirs of the Royal Academicians (1796), which also presents a mock academic oath administered to West: "That you shall never take one hundred pounds for a picture, when you can get one hundred guineas." (34) The subsequent decade that Pasquin spent in the United States (to which he was politically sympathetic) seems only to have reinforced his perception that Americans loved money. In 1811, he imagined the American foreign minister toasting harmony between his country and Britain at the Royal Academy's annual dinner and calling on "his fellow citizens, Messrs. West and Copley," to sing a duet (to the tune of "Yankee Doodle"): "From Philadelphia's broad-brimmed race / Who vanity have undone / I took my easel on my back / And crossed the seas to London!" begins West, who is then joined by Copley: "Let David paint for hungry fame / And Wilkie subjects funny / Let Turner sit and study storms / But we will paint for money." (35) Against such reminders of his American origins and the background of renewed hostilities between Great Britain and the United States, West continued to assert his ties to the country he had lived in for fifty years. He represented himself on the side of Britannia in The Reception of the American Loyalists by Great Britain, a painting seen in the background of West's 1812 portrait of John Eardley Wilmot, the commissioner who had investigated claims by loyalists for compensation of losses suffered during the American Revolution. (36) Though West cannot have wished to reinforce opinion about his excessive concern for money, that may have been an unintended effect of the picture.

West's vulnerability on the subject of his nationality increased during the war of 1812-14 between Britain and the United States. Samuel F. B. Morse, West's student in 1811, was quite blunt on "the virulence of national prejudice" among Britons, who, he said "no longer despise, they hate, the Americans." (37) West's long residence in London may have spared him much of the acrimony, but he could not escape continuing questions about his loyalty. He and his supporters responded with increasing exasperation, painfully evident in a short biography published in 1813 to accompany an engraved portrait of West by H. Meyer after Thomas Lawrence's painting of 1811. Exactly fifty years after West's arrival in England, the writer felt compelled to devote a third of the text to tedious demonstration of "the erroneousness of an opinion entertained by many, that the venerable President of the Royal Academy is not an Englishman, nor even a British subject."

  The father of Mr. West, as it has been shewn, was unquestionably
  English, and he himself was born when Pennsylvania was an English
  province, and both the father and son having quitted America long
  before the Northern Colonies had ceased to form a part of the British
  Empire, the allegiance of neither can be more dispensed of by the
  parent State: consequently nothing can be more unjust than to question
  the validity of Mr. West's title to the honour of being a citizen of
  this country, only because he was not actually born in these islands.
  Children of Englishmen are born in every part of the world; these,
  nevertheless, the country is bound to receive as its legitimate
  offspring; and the State cannot withhold from them its protection. It
  is manifest, therefore, that the above-mentioned opinion respecting
  the country of Mr. West must have been owing to the ignorance of the
  true circumstances of the life of that eminent Artist, as communicated
  in this short memoir. (38)

The uncredited author was Joseph Farington, writing on commission from Thomas Cadell (whose firm would publish Galt's Life of West three years later). Though intimately acquainted with his subject, Farington asked West to provide "a Biographical Acct, of himself to accompany the print," implying that the artist could control the content. West responded by directing Farington to the earlier biographies in Windsor Guide and Public Characters: "I have seen both of those publications," he added, "and as far as they have gone respecting my families History, and myself--they are accurate." (39) Three days later, Farington met with Cadell to discuss the project, which came out within two months. After Farington showed it to West, he noted the artist's approval and particular attention to the passage concerning his nationality. "He could be considered only to be an Englishman," observed Farington (who made a distinction between West's legal status and his "American" temperament); "he did not object to this statement and proof." (40)

While the forceful assertion of Englishness appears as Farington's idea, there can be no question that he was responding to pressure on West, if not directly from him. West was less passive in shaping published accounts of himself than these exchanges over the 1813 biography suggest, as Farington well knew. Twice before, West had hinted at his own involvement. In 1808, for example, after Farington "mentioned to West the good observations" in La Belle Assemblee, West responded: "'You know where they come from,' meaning Himself." (41) His controlling hand becomes literally evident when these early biographies are compared with an autobiographical manuscript in West's handwriting, marked as an original text by his numerous strikeovers and insertions. (42) Thoroughly mined for the various publications on the artist that appeared during his lifetime, the document yields no new biographical details--but it demonstrates that West's determination to shape accounts of his life did not commence with Galt. The 1816 biography, instead, more openly continued a practice he had engaged in all along, even as it dramatically changed course by featuring the American story West had previously suppressed.

West's repeated efforts to secure his identification as English, I believe, served an ambitious goal: to facilitate his identification as head of the English school of painting. To the extent that such leadership was defined in terms of the Royal Academy and its agenda, West had some legitimate claims to the distinction. Though not the institution's founding president (his relative youth and inexperience in 1768 would have made that unthinkable), West succeeded on terms that Reynolds laid out but could not himself meet: as a specialist in history painting, with royal patronage no less. He might have expected his election to the presidency, following Reynolds's death, to complete his triumph. In that role, however, West failed utterly to match Reynolds's authority, inviting immediate and unfavorable comparison to his learned predecessor with his inaugural address, West's only published discourse. (43) By contrast, Reynolds's erudition, demonstrated in frequent publications during his lifetime, was fully displayed in a two-volume edition of his complete writings (1797) by Shakespeare scholar Edmond Malone, an executor of the artist's estate. (44) Malone added his own glowing appraisal of Reynolds's life and character--compounding the effect of the immediately posthumous Testimonies to the Genius and Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds (45)--and he had gathered sufficient new material, including an assessment by Edmund Burke (another close friend and executor), to issue an expanded three-volume edition in 1798. Strikingly, many of Reynolds's supporters chose to remember him as a history painter, a limited aspect of his production relative to portraiture--and from West's perspective, a distortion. The accolades continued into the nineteenth century, in broader contexts. "The English school of painting must acknowledge Sir Joshua Reynolds as its great founder," proclaimed John Gould in A Dictionary of Painters, Sculptors, Architects, and Engravers ... from the Earliest Ages to the Present Time ... to which is added an Appendix ... forming a complete English School (1810). (46) Though Gould praised West warmly in the introduction, his decision to limit proper entries to deceased artists had the effect of highlighting Reynolds. Academy professor J. M. W. Turner, a star among the younger generation of English painters, removed even the barrier of death when, in 1811, he praised Reynolds as "that ever living ornament of the English school." (47)

If West chose to measure success in terms of income from painting or sheer numbers of works (and clearly he did), then he had been among the most successful artists of his generation. In 1811, he broke all records for a living painter, gaining a much-needed boost to his public profile and finances (diminished by the loss of his royal sinecure) after the British Institution for Promoting the Fine Arts in the United Kingdom paid the staggering sum of 3,000 guineas to acquire his enormous painting Christ Healing the Sick in the Temple. (The artist originally promised the work to the Pennsylvania Hospital, in Philadelphia, but later sent that institution a close variant, Fig. 4.) West showed his gratitude--and pressing need to keep his image in memory--by having a medal struck with his profile for distribution to British Institution patrons, including the prince regent and other nobility, whose names appear with a tribute on the verso. (A modified version bears a different inscription on the verso: BENJAMIN WEST / AGED SEVENTY SEVEN / IN THE FULL POSSESION / OF HIS POWERS / AND OF HIS GLORY / MDCCCXV, Fig. 5.) (48) Though West had been one of the organizers of the British Institution, in 1805, he gained only honorary membership (as president of the Royal Academy) because George III, wearied of ongoing conflicts in the academy, made royal patronage conditional on the limited involvement of artists. (49) Even so, the purchase of Christ Healing the Sick gave the embattled academy president good reason to consider the British Institution an ally in preserving his reputation.

West's longevity worked against him when the British Institution, which usually showed contemporary art or Continental old master paintings, decided to mount retrospective exhibitions of work by several prominent eighteenth-century painters--in effect, defining them as British old masters. (50) The first, in 1813, focused on Reynolds with a comprehensive display of some two hundred paintings. (51) West responded defensively to this sweeping survey of Reynolds's career; in 1814, he announced a plan (never realized) to show "the entire body of his Works, produced in the last half century, which he intends shall appear in Exhibition before the Public in the course of the two subsequent years," implying that his huge catalogue could not be accommodated at once. (52) That same year, the British Institution staged a second, group retrospective: 221 paintings by William Hogarth, Richard Wilson, Thomas Gainsborough, and (in smaller number) Johann Zoffany, nearly excluded on grounds that he was not British. (53) West probably did not regard the latter three artists as a threat, since they specialized in the academically lessexalted genres of landscape and portraiture. Hogarth presented more of a problem, as the only serious contender to Reynolds in contemporaneous debates as to the rightful founder of the British school.

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The revival of Hogarth's reputation (already under way in 1814) undoubtedly caught entrenched academicians like West off guard. During his lifetime, Hogarth's combatively anti-elitist stance had attracted barbs from Reynolds and his coterie, who sought to dismiss Hogarth as a "sign painter," the sort of artisan from whom they distinguished themselves as professionals. West, in London for only a year when Hogarth died, had considerably less exposure to the rancorous exchanges between Hogarth and his various enemies and did not share their antipathy for him. West may even have styled himself as a teacher following the relatively egalitarian, Hogarthian model, a possibility suggested by Pratt's American School. West's centrality to the Royal Academy, and his paintings, nevertheless firmly identified him with the Continental method of instruction, based on copying and the veneration of European old masters, that Hogarth firmly opposed. In the dramatically different political climate of the early nineteenth century, concerns that British art had become corrupted by slavish adherence to European models rekindled interest in Hogarth, whose work was promoted as more natural and more English. Hogarth's canvases of modern moral subjects, once dismissed as frivolous and vulgar (and long familiar only in engraved form), gained new respect as history paintings. This development cannot have escaped West's attention, and it must have alarmed him. If not only Reynolds but also Hogarth might be exalted as founders of modern British painting, how would West be remembered? (54)

West's own memories of America--and the curiosity of Galt, the Scottish writer--had a very considerable effect on the outcome. The artist's systematic reflection on his early years began not later than 1805, at the height of his troubles in the Royal Academy, after a serendipitous encounter with a manuscript of castaway adventure. The author was William Williams, a sailor from Bristol who may have based the substantially fictional account on his own youthful experience of Central America. By the late 1740s, Williams had moved to Philadelphia, where he became an artist--and Benjamin West's first instructor. "Had it not been for him," West avowed in 1805, "I should never have been a painter." (55) The owner of the manuscript, hoping to see it published, asked West to write up his recollections of Williams (who died in 1791). The resulting letter of 1810, the most detailed primary source for the fascinating Williams, is also a key document in the life of West, who seized the opportunity to reimagine his own beginnings. (56) Williams's novel, finally published in 1815 as The Journal of Llewellyn Penrose, a Seaman, bore a dedication to West and excerpted extensively from his letter in the preface. With part of his American story in print, West gained a motivation to relate the matter more fully. He was likely released to do so, as well, by the death in 1815 of his American colleague Copley, a constant professional irritant and rival in London and the one man who both could and would have challenged West's American story. With significant encouragement from Galt, West authorized a complete tactical reversal of his insistent claims of Englishness. The biography of 1816 presented instead a remarkable, and at the time quite unfamiliar, account of the famous British painter's formative years--the story of the American West.

[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]

An Enterprising Scot

John Galt's role in creating The Life and Studies of Benjamin West has frequently been underestimated, with the writer's full endorsement. The phrase "compiled from materials furnished by himself"--that is. West--appearing after the title and above Galt's name immediately qualified his role, as did Galt's prefatory characterization of the book as West's "memoirs." Years later, Galt reaffirmed the point: The Life of West was, "as nearly as it possibly can be, an autobiography." (57) Why shouldn't we believe him? Because Galt had a lifelong habit of obscuring or creating confusion about his authorship. He made conventional use of pseudonyms (in periodical writing) and anonymity (in novels); he inserted his own perspective into texts by others, without clarifying his contribution; and he was fascinated with autobiography, both real (two distinct accounts of himself take up three volumes) and imaginary (Fig. 6). (58) He even melded the two in a fictional autobiography based on an authentic autobiographical manuscript that he purchased from its American author--who then published the original text with an introduction by Galt, a complication the Scot must have delighted in. (59) Although many of those activities postdated The Life of West, Galt in 1816 qualified as something more than "an unsuccessful hack writer," the routine characterization of West scholars, as if there were nothing to learn from his work. (60) He might more generously be described as a writer of unfocused talents. Not until the early 1820s would his literary gifts become apparent, in a series of ironic, fictive autobiographies. These genuinely innovative works won him the respect of his peers--Samuel Coleridge, for one, judged Galt "in the first rank of contemporary Novelists"--and later attracted the attention of literary scholars. (61) Yet literary historians are barely more concerned with Galt's nonfiction writing than art historians are with Galt's oeuvre beyond The Life of West. Such disciplinary focus has flattened an interesting story, which takes shape when The Life of West is considered in the light of Galt's early and later work, both fiction and nonfiction--the story of Galt and West's mutual attraction and their collaborative crafting of a memorable life.

Precisely when biographer and subject first became acquainted remains unclear. Galt was forty-one years younger, born in 1779 in western Scotland and raised in Greenock, the port city of Glasgow. He became a customs house clerk at sixteen and soon thereafter joined a merchant firm; business engaged him intermittently throughout his life, with consistently poor results. Galt's interest in writing emerged early, marked from the first by experimentation with diverse genres--poetry, plays, biography, essays, novels--and by an "ominous facility of output," in biographer Ian Gordon's apt phrase. (62) Encouraged by the publication of a few works in Scottish newspapers and journals and hoping to expand his business prospects, Galt moved to London in 1804. A decade later, he was still floundering, with one commercial bankruptcy behind him and no better than marginal success as a writer. At the same point in life West, by contrast, had become famous.

Galt's earliest published remarks on the subject of art appear in two books of essays and an article based on his travels in the Mediterranean. In each case, a business venture in Gibraltar gave way to an extended tour, the first intermittently in the company of Lord Byron, whom Galt met en route (and later made the subject of a biography). Each tour resulted in a volume printed at the author's expense by the London firm of Cadell and Davies. Galt's few pages on painting in Voyages and Travels in the Years 1809, 1810, and 1811 (1812) express a conventional belief in the primacy of nature; the old masters in the royal collection at Palermo, Sicily, attracted him because they did not try to surpass nature, unlike "the artists of the English Academy" (unspecified), who "have much to unlearn." Next, admitting a "shocking disregard of keeping" (that is, customary standards). Galt makes a conceptual leap from "the master-pieces of the Italian artists to the Barbers' signs of Palermo," an association he defends as "natural" because the latter were also "pictures." Galt did not invoke signboards to subvert the old masters, as had Hogarth fifty years before. Instead, as a writer whose works are suffused with the Scottish Enlightenment concern for social evolution and for whom progress would be a constant theme, he may have regarded the signboards as representing a relatively primitive stage in the development of painting that in Sicily coexisted with more mature manifestations. Artists of humble beginnings might, under such circumstances, make accelerated individual progress. Galt offers the example of a shoemaker's son from Trapani ("the fourth city in Sicily") who was "permitted to indulge the invincible propensity of his genius" only after he had "spoiled a great deal of leather by scratching figures on it with an awl." By the time of Galt's writing, the distracted apprentice had become one of "the most eminent" living painters, creating works in Rome deemed "little inferior to Raphael." (63) The story of irrepressible genius, a well-established convention, anticipates Galt's more sustained engagement with artistic beginnings in The Life of West.

[FIGURE 6 OMITTED]

During the visit to Sicily, the writer acquired material for his first publication expressly concerned with art, for Philosophical Magazine (a journal edited by his new father-in-law, Alexander Tilloch) in 1813: "On the Fine Arts: An Essay founded on a Discourse delivered by the Cavaliere Ferro e Ferro, President of the Accademia del Decernimento of Trapani.* By Mr. John Galt." (64) Galt's contribution to the treatise is unclear, as it would often be in his publications. The note to the title stated that the "original Italian work, consisting of two volumes quarto, containing four discourses by Sig. Ferro, was not printed for sale, but was circulated gratuitously among the Author's friends"; however, passages on English architecture, the "Elgin marbles," and poet Robert Southey indicate that the essay is not merely a translation. Galt was franker about his hand in the work when he expanded on the same putative base in Letters from the Levant (1813), his second collection of travel essays. Letter 26 (dated in Athens) presents, he writes, a distillation of the same discourses interspersed with his own ideas, now clearly including the remarks on English poetry, "something complimentary and national, in case your [the reader's] patience has been worn out." (65)

Letters from the Levant offers the earliest evidence of Galt's acquaintance with West. To justify including his own opinions on fine art in that volume, he declared in its preface: "they have been printed in consequence of the approbation with which Mr. West, unquestionably the greatest artist of the age, was pleased to notice a few observations on the same subject, which the Author has elsewhere published" (presumably the Philosophical Magazine essay). (66) If this marked the beginning of a dialogue between the two men, it was an opportune moment for both. After terrible reviews for a volume of blank-verse tragedy, published in 1812, Galt's Life and Administration of Cardinal Wolsey, also of 1812, had been more favorably received, with good sales of the biography adding a concrete boost to his perennially shaky finances. (67) Galt must have been casting about for another biographical subject, and he soon found one who would spare him the time and expense of research (no longer feasible after his marriage in April 1813) and whose connections might do him good. In April 1814. New Monthly Magazine announced that Galt was "engaged upon a life of the venerable President of the Royal Academy ... under the immediate superintendance of Mr. West himself." (68) West had biography in mind as well, following the publication in 1813 of painter James Northcote's Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Rushed into print to coincide with the British Institution retrospective, the book intensified the spotlight on Reynolds, but few considered the rambling memoir by Reynolds's former pupil a success. West and his friends pronounced the book "vulgar" and full of inappropriate and undigested material; irked reviewers saw a momentous life--whose history was, "so far as it extends, the history of the modern English school of painting"--reduced by an undiscerning author to a "trifling," "dull," "hackneyed" "bundle of bon mots." (69) "We shall have to lament that Sir Joshua Reynolds was not also his own biographer," ventured one critic, who concluded that "a life self-written, and commented upon afterwards by an impartial acquaintance, would be the most perfect piece of biography." (70)

West's collaboration with Galt came as close to meeting those parameters as the artist could have managed. He was not known for facility with language, spoken or written. Even during a time of loose orthographic standards, West's deficiencies appear pronounced, as in 1767, when he explained his delay in responding to a letter on grounds of "having been so much ingaged in the Study of my Bussiness, particularly that of History painting which demands the greates cear & intelegance amaginable." (71) Such problems were exposed after West became a public figure, if often exaggerated: "Most young gentleman that I am acquainted with can read and write," declared a commentator for Middlesex Journal;"... Mr. W**t lies under a violent suspicion of ignorance in both these vulgar accomplishments; for I am well informed that Mr. W**t, in the subscription of his name, is guided by his wife." (72) Elizabeth West made diplomatic apologies for her husband--"He was so devoted to drawing while a Child, and a Youth, that every other part of his education was neglected"--but her grandnephew, poet Leigh Hunt, put it more bluntly: West "had received so careless, or so homely an education when a boy, that he could hardly read." (73) Nor did the artist's verbal skills redeem him. His pronunciation seemed, at the very least, odd--Hunt termed it "puritanical barbarism"--and, at worst, laughably wrong. He spoke in a way that even his friend Sir George Beaumont deemed "crude." (74) West, in short, had every reason to desire professional assistance in relating the story of his life. If the language in The Life of West is rather plain and flat, unlike Galt's descriptive writing in the biography of Cardinal Wolsey (or the ornate prose in parts of his George III, 1820), an explanation may lie in Galt's wish to represent, albeit indirectly, a speaking style that might charitably be called unadorned. (75)

West's narration of his own story played right into the biographer's hands, to a degree that could only have been appreciated in retrospect. Galt's major literary works of the 1820s can be described as imaginary autobiographies, featuring provincial characters whose lives the reader pieces together from idiomatic correspondence, reminiscences, or self-consciously constructed memoirs. Galt rejected the classification of these works as "novels," citing his lack of concern for plot; in many of his stories, he asserted, "the only link of cohesion ... is the mere remembrance of the supposed author." (76) To create the appearance of truth through realistic representation of the ordinary and particular was Galt's aim--a literary parallel, in his view, to the genre paintings of his slightly younger countryman, David Wilkie. Wilkie's wildly successful first submission to a Royal Academy exhibition. The Village Politicians in 1806, impressed Galt deeply; The Blind Fiddler, shown in 1807, prompted him to write the artist. Galt invoked a shared interest in "the peculiarities of conduct, opinion and notions among the peasantry" and enclosed a literary "scetch of two pieces," which he compared to Wilkie's "visible representation of a portion of the same class of ideas." (77) West, despite his contradictory pictorial insistence on generality, also admired Wilkie and can hardly have avoided discussing the Scottish painter with the Scottish writer (who could not escape that characterization even when his subject was not Scottish). (78)

Galt's engagement with Scottish subjects had intensified by 1813, when he contacted Edinburgh publisher Archibald Constable with a book proposal, the chronicle of fifty years in a country parish (1760-1810), composed by a fictive lowland Scots minister at the end of his life and career. (79) He met with no encouragement, advised that Scottish novels would not succeed. (80) Galt then drew on his extensive travels in the Mediterranean to produce his first published work of fiction in 1816. The Majolo, another experiment with the self-told narrative. Cast as the recollected observations of a Sardinian who had long ago traveled across Europe and Great Britain (as related to an Englishman), it is, in effect, a disquisition on national character. Galt termed it "a species of moral portraiture." (81) Issued a few months after The Life of West, The Majolo was poorly received. In 1820, taking advantage of his good acceptance rate for essays by the recently established Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Galt returned to Scottish subjects with "The Ayrshire Legatees," a story serialized in Blackwood's. (82) Expanding on his own experience and on the type of the epistolary novel, Galt threw his Scottish characters into relief by setting them against the background of metropolitan London. On the one hand are four family members who travel to the city to collect an inheritance and relate their adventures in letters home; each has a distinct voice, with varying mixtures of Scots and English suggesting age, gender, education, and aspirations. On the other, presented directly, are a sharply drawn cast of small-town, Scottish characters, who read and comment on the letters in passages combining narration and dialogue. Hugely popular and revised for book publication as The Ayrshire Legalees in 1821, the series accomplished a resurrection of the fictive minister's chronicle, issued the same year under the title Annals of the Parish. At forty-one, Galt had become an important novelist. (83)

Galt's subjects during the five years before and after publication of The Life of West reveal how neatly the artist's story dovetailed with the writer's own interests and aspirations, both literary and entrepreneurial. West was a provincial unknown who became an international success; an observer in Mediterranean lands and an exotic curiosity to be observed; an American who, like the Scottish writer, could never be English; a shaper of his own life story; a supremely well-connected public figure; and a man like any other, aging and concerned for his legacy. At the time he met Galt, West was ripe for biography. Mere acquaintances quickly discovered that he liked to talk about himself and to be flattered, and he must have responded readily to the attentions of Galt (who, in Rembrandt Peale's later recollection, appeared to "prey" on the elderly artist). (84) Given West's previous reticence about his life in the American colonies and his endorsement of repeated characterizations of himself as English, it seems highly unlikely that he would have decided to produce a public account of his American experience without Galt's intervention. That point, at least, Galt acknowledged. In his own autobiography, he noted that during his visits to West's studio, the painter "mentioned anecdotes of his early youth"; "these seemed to me interesting," Galt continued, "and ultimately I proposed to write the first part of [West's] Life, to which he assented." (85)

Galt had a long-standing interest in the Americas. His father owned a West Indian trading ship and his brother and other relatives had immigrated to Honduras, Virginia, Vermont, and Canada. While writing West's biography, Galt worked (unsuccessfully) as a parliamentary lobbyist on behalf of Canadians who had suffered losses in the most recent war with the United States. (Galt himself later moved to Canada, in 1825, a business venture that ended in another bankruptcy and a stay in debtor's prison after his return to London in 1828.) His early publications included "A Statistical Account of Upper Canada" (1807), an anecdotal hodgepodge of secondhand information on Canadian climate, diseases, lakes, hemp cultivation, religion, and so on. Under the heading "miscellaneous considerations," Galt broadly introduced one of his enduring subjects: "the plain tales of those who, by virtue of their designs alone, have improved the conditions of mankind." Despite his nominal focus on Canada, Galt singled out "the high moral character of the Pennsylvanians even at this day ... [as] the fairest monument that wisdom and enterprise can hope to obtain." (86) As West's biographer, he gained the opportunity to focus on one exemplary and resourceful Pennsylvanian, a great man of humble beginnings, whose story neatly accommodated Galt's conception of progress as the result of providential design and human action in the everyday world. (87)

Galt's focus on West's formation and West's voice allowed him to substantially avoid critical consideration of West's art, which might have opened the writer to charges that he lacked qualifications as an artist or theorist. Galt seems also to have been sensitive to perceptions that West himself had difficulty articulating theory (as opposed to method). The limitation hardly mattered: in his preface to the 1816 volume, Galt contended that West's decision to relate

  the circumstances by which he was led to approximate, without the aid
  of an instructor, to those principles and rules of art, which it is
  the object of schools and academies to disseminate, has conferred a
  greater benefit on young Artists than he could possibly have done by
  the most ingenious and eloquent lectures on the theories of his
  profession. (88)

The compiler's role (even if only that) was hardly trifling. By serving as West's sounding board and providing structure for the old artist's recollections, Galt too had made a contribution to art and its history.

The American West

In hindsight, it is clear that the stakes in the collaboration between West and Galt, whose reputation in no way depended on this work, were all West's. He had legitimate reasons to fear the continued decline of his reputation in England and went to remarkable lengths to keep his name, work, and image in circulation--astonishingly, even using stationery engraved with his portrait (Fig. 7). With the biography, West may have hoped to persuade the British art world to read his American origins as closer to nature, a quality more valued in 1816 than academic credentials. He stood to gain even more in the United States. Fifty-six years away from his native land had limited his negative exposure there, while more than two dozen American students augmented the positive. In the role of mentor, West had done as much to nurture the development of American art as anyone.

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.

[FIGURE 7 OMITTED]

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.

After three years without further mention, West resurfaced in Port Folio with a second biographical account in 1809. The magazine had been losing money and the new owner, Philadelphia publisher Samuel Bradford, was determined to broaden its appeal. (Dennie remained as editor, though intermittently sidelined by poor health.) Illustrations formed part of the popularizing strategy; however, none of West's pictures was reproduced until 1811, when line engravings of The Death of General Wolfe and other works accompanied the reprinted Belle Assemblee biography (the third on West to appear in Port Folio). The 1809 account--adapted from Universal Magazine and Public Characters--made a clear pitch to readers in the United States, beginning with the title: "Anecdotes of American Painters: West." Although the first sentence introduces him (somewhat anomalously) as "the head of the English school of painters," the biography pruned West's English family tree and early association with important Britons, while condensing details of his career in London. A new paragraph on the undeveloped state of painting in "our country" during West's youth and a passage injecting some tension into his decision to stay in England provide an American perspective. Once more, the allure of "princely favor" proved too great, culminating (again, only on paper) in West's knighthood. (92)

West made a number of indirect attempts to assuage American feelings about his British alliances. With equal indirectness, contributors to Port Folio rebuffed those efforts, in a manner suggesting that West was out of touch with the United States. In 1810, the magazine published a long letter from West to Charles Willson Peale, the prominent Philadelphia painter who had once been his student. Citing his feelings "as a native of the state of Pennsylvania," West applauded state support of Peale's museum and the establishment of an academy in Philadelphia (the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, founded in 1805, with West as an honorary member). Without originality, he predicted that the city would eventually become "the Athens of the Western empire"--a distinction he professed to believe no longer possible for Great Britain. In response, "a citizen of Philadelphia" tersely undercut West's flattery. Nations in which nature retained "dominion over manners and character"--namely, Britain and the United States--had little need of art, he wrote: "we are still in a state of nature ... we stand in no need of copies of it." (93) Many prominent Americans--including members of the Adams family, major contributors to Port Folio during its early years--did not wish to encourage the fine arts. They considered art a corrupting luxury, destabilizing to a republican society that depended on the disinterested exercise of virtue, a vision of the nation that had been fading since the election of Jefferson. (94) West was British, not a citizen of the United States; still, his prominence as an internationally famous, American-born artist made him a potent example. His status accounts for Port Folio's many features on West, but those betray considerable ambivalence about the effect the artist might have on the production and reception of art in America.

West's more transparent efforts to promote himself nearly always worked against him. The last issue of Port Folio to be edited by Dennie contains a long response to the "pompous and pedantic panegyric" on West's Christ Healing the Sick that had appeared in Poulson's American Daily Advertiser, a Philadelphia newspaper. (95) The Advertiser in fact published two items: a letter from West to Philadelphian Joseph Wharton, explaining his decision to allow Christ Healing the Sick (promised to the Pennsylvania Hospital) to remain in Britain, and the offending "Description of the Picture," which West had enclosed with his letter. West endorsed that text as the product of "one of the ablest Pens in this country" (England) and immodestly added: "The judges of literature with us, say, the inspired pencil [of the artist], has created an inspired pen, in that written account of the picture." (96) Port Folio's criticism of the gloss on West's picture thus implicitly targeted the artist himself.

The essay in Port Folio, entitled "Some Remarks on Mr. West's Picture," opens with a string of unattributed quotations, apparently the first level of these "remarks": "the Corregiescity of Corregio," "the airs of Guido," "draperies ... so flowing and 'moelleux,'" "handling ... like Tintoret, the very thunderbolt of the pencil." The disconnected prose fully exposes the trite affectation of these passages--only some of which derive from the published description of Christ Healing the Sick (the two last cited here are a direct quotation and a loose paraphrase). The opening phrases (including the first two here) are instead quotations from Laurence Sterne's masterpiece of literary invention, Tristram Shandy. Port Folio's highly literate readers might have been expected to make the connection themselves, but the writer did not leave the matter to chance: "'Grant me patience just heaven!,' I exclaimed in the words of Sterne, '... of all the cants that are canted in this canting world ... the cant of criticism is the most tormenting.'" (97) Sterne's book, however eccentric, made a case for common sense, and that was the point of Port Folio's essay. The author denounced all pretension and "jargon" in art criticism and offered a constructive alternative, taking as his reference point a line engraving of Christ Healing the Sick published in Port Folio two months earlier. He conceded limitations to evaluating a painting from a simple engraving and systematically assessed which parts of a picture might fairly be judged on such a basis. He then carefully defended the ability of any man with "pretensions to little more than plain sense, and common observation" to make reasonable judgments, along with the right to do so in plain terms. If a painting were sufficiently absurd to show "Abraham about to blow out the brains of Isaac with a pistol," it would be merely "the criticism of common sense" to describe it as such (and laughter is permissible). Finally, and relatively briefly, the writer demonstrated the process for readers with remarks on West's picture, mostly unfavorable. The essayist's broad purpose had been to demystify art criticism and to encourage a plain American alternative to the inflated language of English connoisseurship. The immediate effect, however, was deeply unflattering to West.

The sequence of articles on West that appeared in Port Folio between 1801 and 1812 make clear that, for all its attentions to an artist who had done much to advance American art, the magazine's editors and contributors did not stand in awe of him. On the one hand, West remained an American from whose nationality the country gained no "profit," whose "overgrown daubing," moreover, served the wrong kind of example. On the other, he was the "illustrious countryman" whose opinion of talented young Americans carried weight. (98) Brief notices of other American painters had appeared in Port Folio, but never as proper biographies, whereas West had been the subject of three such profiles in six years. Those accounts acquired a broader context when the journal's second editor, Nicholas Biddle, inaugurated a yearlong series of twenty-two artist biographies, ranging from Michelangelo and Raphael through five painters of the French or "Flemish" school (including Rembrandt); together, the magazine asserted, they constituted "a complete history of the modern [sixteenth- and seventeenth-century] arts." (99) In 1814, West explicitly gained a place in a distinguished sequence of painters: "Raphael, Titian, Corregio, Rubens, or West." (100) He was on his way to becoming an American old master.

The year 1814 marked a startling turnabout in Port Folio's sniping over West's abandonment of America, precipitated by the British Gallery of Contemporary Portaits biography published in London in 1813. I have argued that the insistence on West's Englishness in that account, with its corresponding suppression of his Americanness, originated with the artist as a desperate effort to promote himself as head of the British school. If identified with him, that effort might have unleashed tremendous scorn in the pages of Port Folio. Instead, the magazine (then edited by Charles Caldwell) leaped to the artist's defense at an attempt, "which we have reason to believe is sanctioned by the concerning voice of the nation, to wrest from his native country and appropriate to themselves, the glory conferred on the present age by the resplendent talents of our countryman, Mr. West" (now purposely not "Sir Benjamin"). Under the title "American and British claims," four adamant pages (matching the tone of the London biography) staked out the American position.

  Mr. West was born and reared to manhood in the province of
  Pennsylvania. Here, of course, the natural foundation of all his
  subsequent greatness was conclusively laid: here were received and
  brought to their unusual strength and perfection, those excellent
  stamina of body, which have sustained, unbroken, the toils and
  challenges of more than seventy years of exertion. The texture of
  his mind, too, is altogether American. Here he imbibed that noble and
  enterprising spirit, and here were formed those habits of industry,
  perseverance and virtue, which, under Providence, were the proximate
  means of his elevation and fame .... here did our great countryman
  manifest his taste, and commence his career in the use of the pencil.
   ... what was left for Great Britain to perform?... From America
  did this great artist derive his talents and all his good qualities
  both physical and moral, and only found in Great Britain a suitable
  field for the exercise and display of them.

In the context of the ongoing war between Britain and the United States, nothing less than the honor of the young nation was at stake: "as well might the people of England assert their claim to the glory attached to the names of Washington ... and the whole host of our revolutionary worthies, because they were born in a British province before the acknowledgment of our independence as a nation." West, in this account, attained the status of national hero, "as much a native of the United States, as any one born in Pennsylvania within the last twenty years, who has never breathed the air of a transatlantic region." (101) Here was a vacuum waiting to be filled with all the unreported details of West's life in America. Whether Galt or West were aware of Port Folio's American claim is unknown. But it would be hard to find two more opportunistic men than they, and by almost any reckoning, the right moment had come for a full public account of West's early years.

Not surprisingly, Galt's biography of 1816 did little to shore up West's reputation in Britain, where its excesses and shortcomings were readily attributed to the artist himself. Critical Review, which published the first of three appraisals, accepted the book "as a specimen of auto-biography" in all respects, including the "observations accompanying the facts"; whether ascribed to West or not, "they bear internal evidence that they could have flowed from no other source." The "arrogance" of so insistently representing West as "an instrument chosen by Providence to disseminate the arts of peace in the world" is, by implication, West's arrogance; the "uncultivated" mind that sees an Indian in the Apollo, exposed in that moment as "little susceptible of grand and beautiful impressions," is West's mind; and the "cautious abstinence from the slightest mention of errors in conduct or opinion" by himself or anyone else represents West's failure of authority, symptomatic of a "habitual and somewhat overstrained anxiety ... to displease nobody." (102) Eclectic Review assigned Galt more control and responsibility for "impertinent digression" and a "propensity to theorize and dogmatize," but that response was unusual. (103) Galt simply reported what West told him, asserted Allan Cunningham, whose popular six-volume Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1829-32)--reissued five times by 1908--proved the most enduring British context for anecdotes from the 1816 biography. The collaborators, moreover, were "intimate friends," inhibiting Galt's ability to place West's recollections in perspective.

Cunningham took that role on himself, turning a number of reported incidents against a subject he viewed as blinded, albeit "amiably," by extravagant vanity. An Italian bard who extolled the promise of the young American and his destined leadership in the arts is, in Cunningham's reimagining, in cahoots with a "wily Scot" (painter Gavin Hamilton) who proposed West as the subject for a song.

  West, who never in his life conceived what a joke meant, sat grave
  and steady like one of his own sitters, while the minstrel unslung
  his guitar, and, with a glance that told Hamilton he knew what to do,
  burst into song. At first he was something mystical, till he saw that
  his subject had a reasonable gift of credulity, and then he tried
  plainer words.... On the raving of this wily mendicant, West bestowed
  both money and tears; and even in riper years he was willing to
  consider this as another prophecy.

"West cannot be born, nor choose his profession, nor enjoy himself in a coffee-house, nor travel through France without the influence or the accompaniment of prediction," added Cunningham, who felt West's belief in predestination "did no one any harm, and himself some good." (104) The basic story of West's encounter with the improvisatore had originated with the artist, according to William Dunlap, who published the anecdote three years before Galt did. Dunlap neither cloaked the event in solemnity (as Galt would do) nor used it to ridicule West (Cunningham's approach). Instead, he expressed an American irritation with "a vagabond Italian rhymster treating us as savages," "one among the many thousand instances of the profound ignorance in which Europeans generally remain respecting this country." (105) Galt's Life of West did little to set the record straight.

In the United States, reviewers showed no more inclination than did their British counterparts to endorse the fabulous passages in Galt. They proved more willing to see the writer as having invented them or, at least, having embellished what he heard from West. Analectic Magazine, another Philadelphia-based journal, issued the first review in September 1816 (just two months after printing a biographical article based on earlier British accounts of West). Moses Thomas, the publisher, had every reason to draw attention to Galt's work, since he was in the process of bringing out an American edition. For the most part, the review either described or quoted Galt's text, with minimal evaluation, a common practice of reviews during that period. In general, the writer found Galt's narration "plain and simple ... without any ambitious metaphors or affected antitheses," if somewhat too much "reverence" on the part of the author, who appeared too readily "inclined to make miracles of ordinary occurrences." (106)

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."

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)

The course of painting in the United States attenuated that connection in ways that Dunlap, nearly seventy when his book appeared, glimpsed but could not fully anticipate. Landscape and genre gained a popularity never enjoyed by historical subjects, and by the mid-nineteenth century, American artists of the colonial and early national periods seemed to many irrelevant. Writers who continued to pay tribute to West felt obliged to confront the instability of his reputation. C. Edwards Lester excavated Beaumont's lament from the footnote at the end of Dunlap's West biography and made it the epigraph to his own chapter on the painter, in The Artists of America (1846). "It has been the fashion in this country to speak slightingly of West," Lester acknowledged, but this was simply wrong; West, he declared, was "the pioneer and father of American Artists." (117) In a much broader and intellectually more ambitious context, James Jackson Jarves was equally emphatic about West's importance: "Americans owe him a statue ... for asserting to the world the aesthetic capacity of a newly fledged race.... He quickened our blood into aesthetic life." (118) Jarves could and did speak of the world--he had been living in Italy for more than a decade, and The Art-Idea (1864) advanced his idiosyncratic theory and history of Western art--but he spoke to Americans (the book was published in New York and Boston) and devoted half the text to American painting, sculpture, architecture, cityscapes, and art institutions. Jarves, like Dunlap, granted West a privileged indigenousness. He dismissed Copley as "American only by birth" and "in every other respect ... thoroughly English." West, on the other hand (whom Jarves thought would have been "more original in invention and national in motives" by remaining on American soil), made his mark as the country's "first-born artist, fresh from the wilderness of the New World." Jarves introduced no details of West's life in his brief discussion, but there can be little doubt that his image of the artist had been shaped by Galt's tale of the charmed American boy.

More than a century after Galt helped West reinvent himself as an American, James Flexner built on that foundation to perform the same task in America's Old Masters, a book designed for general readers. When he began his research in the late 1930s, Flexner recalled, "the English dismissed [West] as an American, and the Americans ... denounced him as an unpatriotic English artist." (119) Some authors of American art survey texts published during the first half of the twentieth century would gladly have excluded West, had not his "peculiar" or even "fatal" influence on younger artists prevented them from ignoring him. (120) Even so, they acknowledged the durability of the West myth. As Samuel Isham noted in 1905, the artist's life had been "worked into a sort of tradition ... known to thousands who never saw one of his pictures." "The story is a remarkable one," he added, "but it has been aided greatly in popularity by telling." (121) Isham recognized the degree to which Galt's "style [was] in harmony with his subject," and he granted the Scottish author the same awareness. He drew on the biography as freely as other writers, yet maintained a critical perspective that was quite unusual. Flexner, for his part, later decided he had been taken in by West's "senile-reminiscences" and "desire to be considered an incarnation of the 'Noble Savage.'" (122) Still, even the 1967 revised edition of his book continued the tradition of preserving colorful stories from Galt's biography. In the rapid expansion of American art history as a scholarly discipline, beginning in the later 1960s, the literature on West increased dramatically, all the while losing its partisan edge. Americanists now generally accept him, without apology or censure, as an important figure in the history of the nation's art. Observing the situation from outside the specialized field, Robert Rosenblum stated in 1990 that West "is worshipped as an American ancestral figure." This suggests a reverence not actually representative of recent scholarship but does reflect the sustained commitment by Americanists to the study of West--even though, in Rosenblum's opinion, "it would be hard to be more British" than he. (123) This was West's position, too, until his collaboration with Galt decisively altered that course.

Instrumental in stirring the old artist's memories, open to the lapses, ready to imagine, and, above all, interested, John Galt helped West secure his place in history. West provided the details, while Galt persuaded him of their importance and imposed a chronological terminus on the narrative, arguing in favor of confining the biography to West's formation as an artist. West himself had been uneasy about ending the story there; he pressed Galt to compose a sequel and examined the last proof "on his death bed," according to the biographer. (124) Galt's account of West's English career, with the exception of a few incidents, has proved less indelible; on that subject, other contemporaries, especially Farington, are more provocative and interesting. But no historical reconstructions of West's years in America and study in Italy, no matter how many emendations to Galt they may provide, have banished the picture of the artist that Galt drew in 1816. West earned his prominent place in American art history as a mentor, but he also created it--working together with John Galt in a public relations effort of enormous consequence for the history of American and, arguably, also of British art.

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.

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.

13. Galt. 1816, 18.

14. The Exhibition, or a Candid Display of the Genius and Merits of the Several Masters whose Works are now offered to the Public at Spring Gardens (1766), quoted in William T. Whitley, Artists and Their Friends in England, 1700-1799, 2 vols. (London: Medici Society, 1928), vol. 1, 211-12; and "To the Printer of the Public Advertiser," May 1767, Press Cuttings from English Newspapers on Matters of Artistic Interest, 1723-1800, National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

15. London Chronicle 33, no. 2565 (May 18-20, 1773).

16. London Courant, May 10, 1788, quoted in Martin Postle, Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Subject Pictures (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 56-57.

17. Peter Pindar [John Wolcot], The Works of Peter Pindar, Esq., new ed., 4 vols. (London: Printed for J. Walker, 1816), vol. 2, 297-98. In his mid-20th-century survey text, Ellis Waterhouse agreed: West "was lucky in that the very mediocrity of his mind found a kindred spirit in the mind of George III"; Waterhouse, Painting in Britain, 1530-1790, Pelican History of Art (1953; reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978), 276.

18. Pindar (as in n. 17), vol. 1, 40-42.

19. West's friend and colleague Joseph Farington made regular notations as to the artist's inflated sense of self, usually citing others but often agreeing with their opinions. See, for example, Farington, vol. 4, 1127 (Jan. 4, 1799), vol. 8, 3143-54, 3157 (Dec. 1, 4, 1807), vol. 9, 3143 (Mar. 2, 1809).

20. According to Galt, West believed he had "already earned by his pencil more eminence than could be conferred on him by that rank" of knighthood; Galt, The Life and Works of Benjamin West, pt. 2 of West's biography, bound with the first volume and published as The Life, Studies, and Works of Benjamin West, Esq. (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies; Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1820), 189-90. A facsimile reprint, with an introduction by Nathalia Wright, appeared as The Life of Benjamin West (Gaincsville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints. 1960).

21. Copley sent Boy with a Squirrel (1765), a portrait of his half brother Henry Pelham, from Boston to London, where it was placed for exhibition with the Society of Artists (predecessor to the Royal Academy), in 1766. Rev. Robert Anthony Bromley first levied his charge against Copley in correspondence of Sept. 10, 1794, but he published the same in the Morning Herald and in the preface to the second volume of his book A Philosophical and Critical History of the Fine Arts, Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture...., 2 vols. (London: By the Author, 1793-95), vol. 2, xxvii-xlii, at xxxv. According to Farington, vol. 1, 235 (Sept. 18, 1794), Copley "says West is at the bottom, and that the allusion ... to the picture of the Squirrel cd. only originate with West."

22. Farington, vol. 6, 2339 (May 31, 1804).

23. West, conversation with Nicholas Biddle, 1807, in Nicholas B. Wain-wright. ed., "Notes and Documents: Conversations with Benjamin West," Pennsylvanin Magazine of History and Biography 102 (Jan. 1978): 113.

24. "Benjamin West, Esq.," European Magazine and London Review 26 (Sept. 1794): 163. Each issue opened with a biographical profile of a noted individual and an engraved portrait on the facing page; artists figured regularly as subjects.

25. The Beauties of the Royal Palaces, or A Porket Companion to Windsor, Kensington, Kew, and Hampton Court ... to Which Are Added Short Sketches of the Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Whose Works Are Exhibited in the Royal Palaces (Windsor, U.K., [1794]).

26. "Biographical Sketch of Benjamin West, Esq. President of the Royal Academy," Universal Magazine, n.s., 3 (May 1805): 388-96, 525-32; "Benjamin West, Esq., President of the Royal Academy," Public Characters of 1805, 1805: 523-69. at 525; and "Benjamin West, Esq. President of the Royal Academy," La Belle Assemblee 4 (Jan. 1808): 5-10, 52-55, 109-11, 149-51, 197-98.

27. An anonymous reviewer of Galt's 1816 biography recognized this story as "one of the few anecdotes that have been made public by Mr. West himself in his lectures at the Royal Academy, almost in the same words"; Critical Review, 5th ser., 3 (June 1816): 585-86. The Apollo story immediately appeared in print, beginning with a next-day report on West's discourse: "Royal Academy," True Briton, no. 610 (Dec. 11, 1794). Others put it to their own uses, including Anthony Pasquin [John Williams] in his stinging Memoirs of the Royal Academicians, ed. R. W. Lightbown (1796; reprint, London: Cornmarket, 1970), 74-75; and Richard Payne Knight, to whom West must have told the story on an earlier occasion, since it appeared in Knight, The Landscape: A Didactic Poem in Three Books (London, 1794), 3 n.

28. Abrams (as in n. 11), 32-35, identified "concealed" indications in West's art of his alleged descent from Lord Delawarre but found no support for that genealogy.

29. Public Characters (as in n. 26), 531-32; succeeding quotations in this paragraph. 534, 537-38, 539, 559.

30. John Dillenberger correlated the lists of West's work published during his lifetime in Benjamin West: The Context of His Life's Work with Particular Attention to Paintings with Religious Subject Matter (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1977), 129-90.

31. Farington, vol. 7, 2492 (Jan. 5, 1805).

32. Universal Magazine (as in n. 26), 389-90.

33. Farington. vol. 8. 2908 (Nov. 16, 1806).

34. Pasquin (as in n. 27). 138, 53. Since a guinea was valued at only one shilling more than a pound. Pasquin may have drawn the distinction to intensify his image of West as a mercenary.

35. Pasquin, Morning Herald, 1811, quoted in Alberts, 346-47. For the most complete account of Williams's turbulent career, see R. W. Lightbown's introduction to Pasquin (as in n. 27), 1-72.

36. West's Reception of the American Loyalists is known only from an outline engraving of 1815 and the representation in West's portrait of John Wilmot. Helmut Von Erffa and Allen Staley speculated that it may never have existed as an independent painting, in The Paintings of Benjamin West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 219-20, cat, no. 106.

37. Samuel F. B. Morse to his parents, Dec, 22, 1814, in Samuel F. B. Morse: His Letters and Journals, ed. Edward Lind Morse, 2 vols. (1914; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press for Kennedy Galleries, 1973), 163. The antipathy aroused by West did not escape Morse, who (without reference to international politics) wrote of the "slanders." "virulence," and "sneers" directed at the artist by his enemies: "He is one of those geniuses who are doomed in their lifetime to endure the malice, the ridicule, and neglect of the world, and at their death to receive the praise and adoration of this same inconsistent world"; Morse to his father, Mar. 12, 1812, in ibid., 68-69.

38. The biography and engraving first appeared in April 1813, as no. 14 in The British Gallery of Contemporary Portraits, later collected as The British Gallery of Contemporary Portraits, Being a Series of Engravings of the Most Eminent Persons Now Living or Lately Deceased in Great Britain and Ireland: From Drawings Accurately Made from Life or from the Most Approved Original Pictures, Accompanied by Short Biographical Notices, 2 vols. (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1822), vol. 2, s.v. "Benjamin West, R.A."

39. West to Joseph Farington, Feb. 3, 1813, Benjamin West Selected Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Farington's receipt of same is reported in Farington. vol. 12, 4293 (Feb. 3, 1813).

40. Farington, vol. 12, 4374 (June 17, 1813). Farington's meeting with Gadell is in vol. 12, 4298 (Feb. 13, 1813).

41. Ibid., vol. 9, 3230 (Feb. 27, 1808). The admission was more oblique in the case of the profile for Public Characters, which West said was written by "one of His ... Sons, & another person"; ibid., vol. 6, 2443 (Nov. 17, 1804).

42. West, "Original Manuscript Autobiography," Charles Allen Munn Collection, Fordham University Library, New York. I owe my awareness of this document to Stephen Mark Caffey.

43. Galt excerpted West's discourses in the second volume of the biography (as in n. 20). West's utter failure to gain consideration as leader of the English school (which I am not trying to amend) is evident in the complete absence of his name from scholarly considerations of the matter. I have nevertheless benefited from these accounts, especially Martin Postle's evaluation of the case for Reynolds: "In Search of the 'True Briton': Reynolds, Hogarth, and the British School," in Towards a Modern Art World, ed. Brian Allen (New Haven: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Yale Center for British Art, 1995), 121-43; and Postle (as in n. 16), 273-311. William Vaughan tracked the increasingly exclusive definition of "Englishness" by the mid-19th century, as measured against other traditions in the British Isles and the British Empire. Early in the century, he found, the terms "English" and "British" were used more or less interchangeably; Vaughan, "The Englishness of British Art," Oxford Art Journal 13, no. 2 (1989): 11-23.

44. Edmond Malone, The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds ... containing his Discourses, Idlers, A Journey to Flanders and Holland, (now first published,) and his commentary on Du Fresnoy's Art of Painting; printed from his revised copies, (with his last corrections and additions,) ... To which is prefixed an account of the life and writings of the author...., 2 vols, (London: T. Cadell, Jun. and W. Davies, 1797).

45. [Samuel Felton], Testimonies to the Genius and Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds (London, 1792). The title page identifies Felton only as "the author of imperfect hints towards a new edition of Shakespeare."

46. [John Gould], A Dictionary of Painters, Sculptors, Architects, and Engravers (London, 1810), xxvii; although the quoted phrase links Reynolds's role as "founder" to the Royal Academy, Gould repeats the characterization without qualification two pages later. Gould drew on various sources for this dictionary; his introductory characterization of Reynolds, West, and the English school closely paraphrases James Dallaway, Anecdotes of the Arts in England, or Comparative Observations on Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting (London, 1800), 521-26.

47. From Turner's lecture as professor of perspective at the Royal Academy in 1811, quoted in Postle (as in n. 16), 291. William Hazlitt offered strong dissent from the admiration for Reynolds's art, theory, or character in six essays for the liberal newspaper the Champion that were published between Oct. 1814 and Jan. 1815.

48. The inscriptions on the British Institution medal read: BENJAMIN WEST PRESIDENT OF THE ROYAL ACADEMY MDCCCXV (obverse); UNDER THE REGENCY [within wreath surrounded by forty names in five circles] RESPECTFULLY TO PERPETUATE THE NAMES OF THOSE WHO IN MDCCCXI SUBSCRIBED TO PURCHASE THE PICTURE OF CHRIST IN THE TEMPLE FOR THE GALLERY OF THE BRITISH INSTITUTE.

49. For a concise overview, see Peter Fullerton, "Patronage and Pedagogy: The British Institution in the Early Nineteenth Century," Art History 5 (Mar. 1982): 59-70. Ann Pullan offered a Marxist reading in "Public Goods or Private Interests? The British Institution in the Early Nineteenth Century," in Art in Bourgeois Society, 1790-1850, ed. Andrew Hemingway and William Vaughan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 27-44.

50. A broader, more eccentric range of deceased British artists received showings organized by a short-lived society calling itself the British School (1802-4). See John Gage, "The British School and the British School," in Allen (as in n. 43), 109-20.

51. The Reynolds retrospective included 138 portraits, 10 history paintings, and 57 other works. The brief catalogue introduction, by the noted connoisseur (and British Institution founding member) R. P. Knight, praised his subject in terms clearly designed to rebuke someone else: Reynolds made "gradual progress to excellence, not by any premature pretensions to a capacity for it"; he "was not one of those aspiring geniuses, those self-selected favourites of nature, who imagine that professional eminence is a spontaneous gift of heaven, or an indefeasible inheritance of right, and will not therefore degrade the native dignity of their talents by undertaking any but important subjects, upon a large scale and at a high price." Knight's primary target seems to have been Benjamin Robert Haydon, but he was not an admirer of West, to whom those remarks might also have applied; [Richard Payne Knight], "Preface to the Exhibition in the Year 1813." in An Account of All the Pictures Exhibited in the Rooms of the British Institution from 1813 to 1823...., by the British Institution for Promoting the Fine Arts in the United Kingdom (London, 1824), 5. Knight and West were, at this moment, the most prominent opponent and proponent of British acquisition of the Parthenon marbles, offered for sale by Lord Elgin. West, characteristically, had used his admiration for the sculptures to promote himself, in a letter that appalled West's friends, but which Elgin gladly printed in a pamphlet designed to stir up support for the purchase. Alberts, 349-52, summarized West's involvement with the marbles.

52. [Benjamin West], Christ Rejected: Catalogue of the Picture Representing the Above Subject; Together with Sketches of Other Scriptural Subjects; Painted by Benjamin West, Esq,... (London, 1814), 15.

53. Sir Thomas Bernard and R. P. Knight objected to Zoffany's inclusion on grounds of nationality; Farington, vol. 13, 4495-96 (Apr. 23, 1814).

54. Three years after West's death, Sir Thomas Lawrence softened the view of West's egotism, suggesting that despite his eminence as a history painter. West "would still have yielded the chief honours of the English School to our beloved Sir Joshua"; Lawrence, Address to the Students of the Royal Academy, Delivered before the General Assembly at the Annual Distribution of Prizes, 10 December 1823 (London, 1824), 12. Others were less certain. West "looked on himself as a sacred being, and the founder of English Art," wrote Walter Thornbury, whose contemptuous characterization makes clear the utter collapse of the artist's reputation in England: Thornbury, British Artists from Hogarth to Turner (London, 1861), 100-101. On the revival of Hogarth's reputation, see David Bindman, Hogarth and His Times: Serious Comedy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 11-28. For the opposition of the "naturalist tradition" associated with Hogarth, Wilson, and Gainsborough to "the historical painting of Reynolds and his followers," see Vaughan (as in n. 43), 14.

55. Thomas Eagles, memorandum of a conversation with Benjamin West, July 10, 1805, William Williams Manuscripts, Manuscripts Department, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.

56. Benjamin West to Thomas Eagles, Oct. 10, 1810, transcribed by Eagles, Williams Manuscripts, ibid. David Howard Dickason published this correspondence in "Benjamin West on William Williams: A Previously Unpublished Letter," Winterthur Portfolio 6 (1970): 127-33. For a close analysis of West's shifting account of his relationship with Williams, culminating in the version in Galt, see Susan Rather, "Benjamin West's Professional Endgame and the Historical Conundrum of William Williams," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 59 (Oct. 2002): 821-64.

57. Galt, 1833, vol. 2, 235-36.

58. In addition to his two-volume autobiography, Galt wrote The Literary Life and Miscellanies of John Galt, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: William Blackwood; London: T. Cadell, 1834); vol. I offers an account of his life as a writer, while vols. 2 and 3 contain previously unpublished writings.

59. Galt's Lawrie Todd, or The Settlers in the Woods, 3 vols, (London: H. Colburn and R. Bentley, 1830) is the fictional "American" autobiography, which led to publication of its real prototype: Grant Thorburn, Forty Years Residence in America, or The Doctrine of a Particular Providence Exemplified in the Life of Grant Thorburn, the Original Lawrie Todd, Seedsman, introduction by John Galt, 2nd ed. (London: J. Fraser, 1834).

60. Abrams (as in n. 11), 31: "a journeyman writer-for-hire" was Alberts's characterization, 409. Alberts concluded, 410, that Galt "fastened on a number of true but relatively minor incidents told him by West and used his creative imagination to develop them into major episodes"--but he did not consider Galt's incentive to do so.

61. Coleridge's marginalia in his copy of Galt's The Provost, or Memoirs of His Own Times (1822), in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Marginalia, vol. 12, pt. 2, ed. George Whalley (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 840-41.

62. Ian A. Gordon, John Galt: The Life of a Writer (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 142, 8: "Galt wrote too much. The volume of what he had to write has always masked the importance and even the existence of the work he really wanted to write." Two collections of essays provide useful perspectives: Christopher A. Whatley, ed., John Galt, 1779-1979 (Edinburgh: Ramsay Head Press, 1979); and Elizabeth Waterston, ed., John Galt: Reappraisals (Guelph, Ont.: University of Guelph, 1985).

63. John Galt, Voyages and Travels in the Years 1809, 1810, and 1811; Containing Statistical, Commercial, and Miscellaneous Observations on Gibraltar, Sardinia, Sicily, Malta, Serigo, and Turkey (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1812), 49-50, 60-61. "Erranti," the Sicilian painter, was Giuseppe Errante (1760-1821). Galt's visit to Albania gave him (as it did Byron) particularly rich material for imagining the evolution of societies, not least, by comparison, that of his native Scotland; see Massimiliano Demata, "From Caledonia to Albania: Byron, Galt, and the Progress of the Eastern Savage," Scottish Studies Review 2 (autumn 2001): 61-76.

64. John Galt, "On the Fine Arts....," Philosophical Magazine 42 (Aug. 1813): 81-91. The word decenere, now obsolete, comes from the Latin root decerno, to decide.

65. Galt (as in n. 10), 224-25.

66. West's encouragement must have meant a great deal to Galt, for he reissued the Sicilian "Discourse" yet again in 1814, characterizing it as so "interwoven with his own ideas" as to be "in some degree an original essay"; Galt, "On the Principles of the Fine Arts," pts. 1, 2, New Monthly Magazine 1 (Feb. 1814): 23-26; 1 (Apr. 1814): 244-46.

67. Galt, The Tragedies of Maddelen, Agamemnon, Lady Macbeth, Antonia, and Clytemnestra (London, 1812), reviewed in Monthly Review 73 (Mar. 1814): 264-71; and idem, Life and Administration of Cardinal Wolsey (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1812). Galt conceived the biography of Wolsey in 1805, soon after moving to England, but did not begin that work in earnest until 1809, at the cost of a "considerable sum" for an assistant who transcribed original documents for publication in an appendix; Galt, 1834 (as in n. 58), vol. 1, 77. Galt paid printing costs for each of his books prior to his work on West, but he could not afford to do so in 1816, having by then a family to support: he sold the copyright on The Life of West to Cadell.

68. "Intelligence in Literature and the Arts and Sciences," New Monthly Magazine 1 (Apr. 1, 1814): 262. Galt was an early and regular contributor to this newly launched magazine, which published his third reworking of the Sicilian discourse (as in n. 66) and "Instructions in the Art of Rising in the World--a Satire," in the Feb. 1 (pp. 18-19) and Mar. 1 (pp. 127-29) issues, where it is ascribed to G. Haliton, Esq. Gordon (as in n. 62), 18, made the attribution to Galt.

69. On the vulgarity of Northcote's Memoirs of Reynolds (London, 1813), see Farington, vol. 12, 4414 (Aug. 20, 1813). West had read only extracts from the book in the Morning Chronicle, Aug. 24, 1813, but said he "did not wish to see any more of it"; Farington, vol. 12, 4416 (Aug. 30, 1813). Review of Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds, by James Northcote, Critical Review, 4th ser., 4 (Oct. 1813); 354, 369 ("irksomeness and insipidity" of the reader's task, 369); and British Critic, 2nd ser., 1 (Feb. 1814): 150.

70. British Critic, 2nd ser., 1 (Feb. 1814): 149-50, 157. Another critic of Northcote's book (in a long essay more tribute to Reynolds than review) thought the opportunity to represent an exemplary life--from which readers might learn--frittered away by an author more interested in the "circumstantial narratives of occurrences which happen to every man in society"; Edinburgh Review 45 (Sept. 1814): 262-92, at 263, 269. Benjamin Robert Haydon identified the writer as R. P. Knight; Farington, vol. 13, 4596 (Oct. 20, 1814). See also Northcote, The Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds, ed. R. W. Lightbown, 2 vols. (2nd ed., rev., 1819; reprint, London: Cornmarket Press, 1971).

71. West to J. S. Copley (who was not much better at spelling), June 20, 1767, in The Letters and Papers of John Singleton Copley and Henry Pelham, 1739-1776, ed. Guernsey Jones (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1914), 56.

72. "Fresnoy," Middlesex Journal, July 29, 1769; the writer made clear that he did not see West as qualified for the title of gentleman on any account.

73. Elizabeth West, in Farington, vol. 6, 2480 (Dec. 26, 1804); and Leigh Hunt, "Benjamin West," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 1 (July 1850): 194.

74. Hunt (as in n. 73); Beaumont's opinion is noted in Farington, vol. 8, 3156 (Dec. 4, 1807). For other reports of West's mispronunciations, see Farington, vol. 8, 3160 (Dec. 10, 1807), vol. 12, 4364 (June 5, 1813), vol. 13, 4492 (Apr. 18, 1814). Haydon, who had little respect for West, represented him as barely coherent in a devastating parody, "Dreams of a Somniator," quoted in James Elmes, Annals of the Fine Arts 3 (1819): 7.

75. Galt also knew that, as Nick Whistler suggested. "understatement appears to denote modesty, so in his own autobiography he chose a plain clear style and adopted an anti-heroic stance to give the impression that his protagonist was a modest but true hero"; Whistler, "Galt's Life and the Autobiography," in Waterston (as in n. 62), 48. The writer may have applied the same principle to the nearly autobiographical Life of West. Galt's sensitivity to language is nowhere more evident than in his Scottish novels, in which even individual characters engage in complex "dialect-switching" according to particular social and psychological situations; see J. Derrick McClure, "Scots and English in Annals of the Parish and The Provost," in Whatley (as in n. 62). 195-210.

76. Galt, 1834 (as in n. 58), vol. 2, 219. Annals of the Parish (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1821) "is so void of any thing like a plot, that it lacks in the most material feature of the novel": ibid., vol. 1, 155.

77. Galt to David Wilkie, May 12, 1807, Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland ms, 9835, fols. 15-16. quoted in Gordon (as in n. 62), 10-11. According to a catalogue entry by H. A. D. Miles, Galt sent Wilkie "copies from drafts of two ... verse descriptions of Scottish peasant life," one of which was published in 1833 as "The Penny Wedding," dedicated to Wilkie, who made a painting of the same title in 1818; Miles, in Sir David Wilkie of Scotland 1785-1841, by William J. Chiego et al. (Raleigh, N. C.: North Carolina Museum of Art, 1987), 171. Galt's subjects, however, were usually drawn from the middle class. On the "ecstatic reception" of Wilkie's art in London, see David H. Solkin, "Crowds and Connoisseurs: Looking at Genre Painting at Somerset House," in Art on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House, 1780-1836 (New Haven: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Courtauld Institute Gallery, 2001), 157-71.

78. Galt's "impotent jokes upon academical education, and malicious sneers leveled against the clergy, for no other reason, as it should appear, than that they have been regularly educated," provoked a reviewer of Letters from the Levant. He proposed Galt's Scottishness as a way to "account for and excuse expressions which ... in an Englishman who might be expected to have some acquaintance with the Universities, and not to be wholly without some tincture of academical learning, would have merited the severity of our censure"; British Critic 1 (Jan. 1814): 66-79. Nicholas Tromans has argued that there was little that was identifiably Scottish in early-19th-century painting, including Wilkie's, though the artist "conformed well enough ... to London stereotypes about Scots in general for those to be trotted out with regularity"; Tromans, David Wilkie: Painter of Everyday Life (London: Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2002), 22. One of those conceptions was that Scots were literal minded; Galt's best fictional works, however, are strongly ironic.

79. Galt, 1833, vol. 2, 227, indicated that the minister's tale, published as Annals of the Parish in 1821, was "nearly finished" when he approached Constable in 1813, but that state of completion is supposed to have been contradicted by his now-lost letter to William Blackwood (the eventual publisher), which referred only to a proposal for a book. See Erik Frykman, John Galt's Scottish Stories, 1820-1823 (Uppsala: Lundequistska, 1959), 31-32.

80. Galt, 1833, vol. 2, 227-28. It cannot have helped that Galt's story offered none of the Highlands exoticism celebrated in the poetry of Walter Scott, whose first novel, Waverley, did not appear until 1814.

81. Galt, The Majolo, a Tale, 2 vols. (London: H. Colburn, 1816).

82. Volume 6 of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine included some half dozen articles attributed to Galt (by Gordon [as in n. 62], 28), of which four addressed art topics: "The Scotchman in London," Oct. 1819: 64-66 (satirical tour of three sculptors' studios); and three articles headed "Transactions of the Dilettanti Society of Edinburgh," Oct. 1819: 89-97, Dec. 1819: 276-79, Mar. 1820: 660-63, on Greek to Renaissance sculpture, 16th-century Italian painting, and English architecture, respectively.

83. Galt. The Ayrshire Legatees, or The Pringle Family (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and T. Cadell, 1821), Galt's name did not appear on the title pages of his fictional works, which, following the success of his first book, gave credit to "the author of Annals of the Parish," and other works. As a businessman and parliamentary lobbyist, Galt did not want his name associated with fiction writing or his person identified with the narrators in his books; he was also following the custom of the most famous Scottish writer, Scott.

84. After a conversation with West in 1807, Nicholas Biddle observed: "He really is a good old man, fond of talking about himself & like all distinguished men I have ever seen equally fond of flattery"; Wainwright (as in n. 23), 109. Rembrandt Peale made clear his dislike of Galt, though in a way calculated to bring credit on himself. Galt "affected" to patronize a needy poet, finding him "a desk job that wore him down," but Peale persuaded the poet to leave "and thus had the satisfaction of having saved his life"; Peale, "Reminiscences: Exhibitions and Academies," Crayon 1 (May 9, 1855): 290.

85. Galt, 1833, vol. 2, 235-36.

86. J. B. Galt, "A Statistical Account of Upper Canada," Philosophical Magazine 29 (Oct. 1807): 7.

87. Galt later contributed to the British edition of another Pennsylvanian's life story: Alexander Graydon's Memoirs of a Life Chiefly Passed in Pennsylvania within the Last Sixty Years (Edinburgh: William Blackwood; London: T. Cadell, 1822)--roughly the same decades of soc