West (Benjamin), P.R.A.
BENJAMIN WEST was born in America, in the year 1738. It is said that his grandfather was one of those who accompanied the celebrated Penn to the young country. Like most of those who make their way in the art of painting, he very early displayed a strong inclination for drawing. After considerable difficulty in pecuniary matters, he was enabled, chiefly through his own industry, to visit Italy. He suffered several severe attacks of illness while in Italy, notwithstanding which his progress in the art was very rapid. He visited London in 1763. His pictures exhibited in Spring Gardens meeting with much favour, he resolved to fix his residence here in the country of his ancestors. The amount of professional work—chiefly historical—produced by this great artist is beyond all precedent. Of his many compositions the best are generally admitted to be those taken from Sacred History. And generally as an historical painter, it would be difficult to name his superior in the amount of his productions and artistic merit. He died in 1820, at the age of 82.
LEIGH HUNT.
Among the large circle of the friends of Mr. West was the late Leigh Hunt, who thus expresses his warm attachment on the sale of the celebrated artist’s pictures:—
“It is a villainous thing to those who have known a man for years, and been intimate with the quiet inside of his house, privileged from intrusion, to see a sale of his goods going on upon the premises. It is often not to be helped, and what he himself wishes and enjoins; but still it is a villainous necessity,—a hard cut to some of one’s oldest and tenderest recollections. There is a sale of this kind now going on in the house we spoke of last week. We spoke of it then under an impulse not easy to be restrained, and not difficult to be allowed us; and we speak of it now under another. We were returning the day before yesterday from a house where we had been entertained with lively accounts of foreign countries and the present features of the time, when we saw the door in Newman Street standing wide open, and disclosing to every passenger a part of the gallery at the end of the hall. All our boyhood came over us, with the recollection of those who had accompanied us into that house. We hesitated whether we should go in, and see an auction taking place of the old quiet abstraction; but we do not easily suffer an unpleasant and vulgar association to overcome a greater one; and besides, how could we pass? Having passed the threshold, without the ceremony of the smiling old porter, we found a worthy person sitting at the door of the gallery, who, on hearing our name, seemed to have old times come upon him as much as ourselves, and was very warm in his services. We entered the gallery, which we had entered hundreds of times in childhood, by the side of a mother, who used to speak of the great persons and transactions in the pictures on each side of her with a hushing reverence, as if they were really present. But the pictures were not there—neither Cupid with his doves, nor Agrippina with the ashes of Germanicus, nor the Angel slaying the army of Sennacherib, nor Death on the Pale Horse, nor Jesus healing the Sick, nor the Deluge, nor Moses on the Mount, nor King Richard pardoning his brother John, nor the installation of the old Knights of the Garter, nor Greek and Italian stories, nor the landscapes of Windsor Forest, nor Sir Philip Sidney, mortally wounded, giving up the water to the dying Soldier. They used to cover the wall; but now there were only a few engravings. The busts and statues also were gone. But there was the graceful little piece of garden as usual, with its grass-plat and its clumps of lilac. They could not move the grass plat, even to sell it. Turning to the left, there was the privileged study which we used to enter between the Venus de Medicis and the Apollo of the Vatican. They were gone, like their mythology. Beauty and intellect were no longer waiting on each side of the door. Turning again, we found the longer part of the gallery like the other; and in the vista through another room, the auction was going on. We saw a throng of faces of business with their hats on, and heard the hard-hearted knocks of the hammer, in a room which used to hold the mild and solitary artist at his work, and which had never been entered but with quiet steps and a face of consideration. We did not stop a minute. In the room between this and the gallery, huddled up in a corner, were the busts and statues which had given us a hundred thoughts. Since the days when we first saw them, we have seen numbers like them, and many of more valuable materials; for though good of their kind, and of old standing, they are but common plaster. But the thoughts and the recollections belonged to no others, and it appeared sacrilege to see them in that state.
‘Apollo from his shrine
Can no more divine:
* * * *
And each peculiar power foregoes his wonted seat.’
“Into the parlour, which opens out of the hall and into the garden, we did not look. We scarcely know why; but we did not. In that parlour, we used to hear of our maternal ancestors, stout yet kind-hearted Englishmen, who set up their tents with Penn in the wilderness. And there we learnt to unite the love of freedom with that of the graces of life; for our host, though born a Quaker, and appointed a royal painter, and not so warm in his feelings as those about him, had all the natural amenity belonging to those graces, and never truly lost sight of that love of freedom. There we grew up acquainted with the divine humanities of Raphael. There we remember a large coloured print of the old Lion-Hunt of Rubens, in which the boldness of the action and the glow of colouring overcome the horror of the struggle. And there, long before we knew anything of Ariosto, we were as familiar as young playmates with the beautiful Angelica and Medoro, who helped to fill our life with love.
“May a blessing be upon that house, and upon all who know how to value the genius of it!”
JOHN CONSTABLE.
Constable used to relate:—“Under some disappointment, I think it was the rejection at the Academy of a view of Flatford Mill, I carried a picture to Mr. West, who said: ‘Don’t be disheartened, young man, we shall hear of you again; you must have loved nature very much before you could have painted this.’ He then took a piece of chalk and showed me how I might improve the chiaroscuro by some additional touches of light between the stems and branches of the trees, saying; ‘Always remember, sir, that light and shadow never stand still,”—and added: ‘Whatever object you are painting, keep in mind its accidental appearance (unless in the subject there is some peculiar reason for the latter), and never be content until you have transferred that to canvas. In your skies, for instance, always aim at brightness, although there are states of the atmosphere in which the sky itself is not bright. I do not mean that you are not to paint solemn or lowering skies, but even in the darkest effects there should be brightness. Your darks should look like the darks of silver, not of lead or of slate.’”
WILLIAM WOOLLET.
The following amusing anecdote is told of the engraver’s unexpected alterations in a plate. On bringing to Mr. West what he conceived to be a finished impression of one of his prints from an historical picture by the great painter, he inquired, with his usual mild deference, “If Mr. West thought that there was anything more to be done to the plate?” The painter, with a tone of affability and a smile of pleasure, while he surveyed the print, exclaimed: “More! Anything more, Mr. Woollet! No, sir, nothing,—nothing. It is excellent! admirable! only just suppose we take down these shadows, in the middle distance; a nothing,—a mere nothing!”—at the same time touching upon that part of the print with grey chalk, to lower it to the requisite tint;—“Nothing, Mr. Woollet! nothing at all! It is fine, very fine!—but perhaps we may throw a little more force into these near figures,”—heightening the shadows with black chalk,—“then, I think, all will be done!—Yes, all! nothing will remain; only, if we can contrive to keep those parts together:”—adding a faint wash of India ink. “There—there, now take it: Mr. Woollet take it; it would be overdoing it to hazard a single touch more! But stop!—stay! this reflection in the water;—a few touches, just to keep it quiet;—and the edges of these clouds a little more,—that is, I mean, a little less edgy,—more kept down. Good, very good!—There, now, Mr. Woollet, you shall not persuade me to give it another touch; you can make these few little alterations, any time at your leisure.” Woollet, who justly looked up to West as the father of the British School of Historical Painting, heard and saw all with thankful good humour, while West spoke and worked, and worked and spoke upon the proof; although the engraver was conscious that the suggested alterations would occupy a long time, and they actually delayed the publication some months, though with great advantage to the effect of the engraving.
JAMES NORTHCOTE, R.A.
“I remember once being at the Academy, when Sir Joshua wished to propose a monument to Dr. Johnson in St. Paul’s, and West got up and said that the King, he knew, was averse to anything of the kind, for he had been proposing a similar monument in Westminster Abbey for a man of the greatest genius and celebrity,—one whose works were in all the cabinets of the curious throughout Europe,—one whose name they would all hear with the greatest respect; and then it came out, after a long preamble, that he meant Woollet, who had engraved his ‘Death of Wolfe.’ I was provoked, and could not help exclaiming: ‘My God! What! do you put him upon a footing with such a man as Dr. Johnson,—one of the greatest philosophers and moralists that ever lived? We have thousands of engravers at any time!’ And there was such a burst of laughter at this,—Dance, who was a grave gentleman, laughed till the tears ran down his cheeks; and Farrington, the painter, used afterwards to say to me, ‘Why don’t you speak in the Academy, and begin with “My God!” as you do sometimes?’”
YOUTHFUL AMBITION.
West entertained very grand notions of Art and of its professors. He was about to ride with a school-fellow to a neighbouring plantation. “Here is the horse,” said the boy, “bridled and saddled, so come, get up behind me.” “Behind you!” said West; “I will ride behind nobody!” “Oh, very well,” said the other, “I will ride behind you; so mount.” He mounted, and away they rode. “This is the last ride I shall have for some time,” said the boy; “for I am, to-morrow, to be apprenticed to a tailor.” “A tailor!” exclaimed West; “you will surely never be a tailor!” “Indeed, but I shall,” returned the other; “it is a good trade. What do you intend to be, Ben?” “A painter!” “A painter!—Why, what sort of a trade is painter? I have never heard o’ it before.” “A painter,” said West, grandly, “is the companion of kings and emperors.” “You are surely mad,” said the other; “Why, they don’t have kings nor emperors in ’Merriky!” “Ah! but there are plenty in other parts of the world. But do you really mean to be a tailor?” “Indeed I do; there’s nothing more certain.” “Then you may ride alone,” said West, leaping down; “I will not ride with one who would be a tailor.”
PERSEVERANCE IN ART.
Being subject to the gout, it attacked his right hand while he was painting his great picture of “Death on the Pale Horse;” but this did not check his ardour, for he proceeded with his left hand, and the whole was finished by himself without any assistance.