Black chalk, squared in white chalk, on buff coloured paper.
Signed and dated: B. West/ 1787.
535 x 330 mm. (21 x 13 in.)
PROVENANCE: Private collection, United Kingdom.
‘President of the Royal Academy, Historical Painter to the King of England, teacher and shining example to three generations of American artists, Benjamin West during the years prior to his death at the age of eighty-one in 1820 was the most prominent artist in the English-speaking world’.
West was bought up in a small rural community in Pennsylvania. His education was minimal but his draughtsmanship bought him to the attention of the Provost of the newly formed College of Pennsylvania, who encouraged his studies and helped him to find patrons. Following a period of some months work in New York, West, jumped at the opportunity offered by the Provost in the Spring of 1760 of a passage on a merchant ship sailing for Italy. His first year there was dramatically interrupted by ill health and an infection left him needing the help of a Florentine surgeon who operated four times on West’s ankle. Fortunate to survive, it took six months to recover fully and only then could he continue his studies, reaching Rome, Parma, Bologna and Venice. Visits to the studios of Batoni and Mengs are recorded and Mengs particularly had a great impact on West. Angelica Kaufmann made a drawing of him in 1763 dressed fashionably in Van Dyck style which is now in the National Portrait Gallery, London. West’s Italian sojourn was the only time that this largely self-taught artist had the opportunity to study the masters of Italian and Classical art and in particular to focus on anatomy. Travelling on through France, West arrived in England in August of 1793 apparently on the invitation of Richard Dalton, George III’s librarian and agent. His fiancé joined him in London the following year and the promise of royal patronage, which only finally materialised in 1768, and commissions received for portraits of English sitters encouraged his decision to remain in the ‘mother country’ as he called it.1 Apart from a brief visit to Paris in 1802, he never left Britain again. His career had begun with portraiture and he was glad for the support of visiting Americans in the early years in England. Portraiture remained his chief source of work until towards the end of the 1760s, West began to crystallise a new Neoclassical style greatly inspired by the works of Mengs and Gavin Hamilton which he had seen in Rome. With extraordinary success, in the space of a few years, he ‘established himself not only as the most advanced proponent of the Neo-classical style but also as the foremost history painter in England’2. Though capable of painting compositions with aesthetic refinement and a sculptural beauty, such as the Venus Lamenting the Death of Adonis of 1768-9 (now in the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburg), West’s ambition to become a serious and dignified history painter had a thoroughly didactic form of expression and was also deeply influenced by his studies of Poussin in Rome and France. This chimed exceedingly well with the spirit of the times and the aspirations of George III to promote a native school of history painting. The king’s support for the newly established Royal Academy and his patronage of Benjamin West were closely entwined: West was often invited to Buckingham Palace, to discuss the best means of promoting the study of the fine arts and West’s high minded painting of The Departure of Regulus was specifically requested by the King for the first exhibition of the Royal Academy in 1769. Between 1768 and 1801, West produced roughly sixty paintings for the King, almost solely on classical themes, and came to entirely dominant the field for commissions, royal and otherwise. Only a rebellion in his determination to paint a historical painting of an American subject, in contemporary rather than classical dress: The Death of General Wolfe caused problems for his relations with the King. A growing interest in national history and an enthusiasm for accurate detail became, however, a dominant aspect of painting in the 1770s even if the episodes were still expected to convey as much elevation and morality as subjects from antiquity. Rubens and Van Dyck became the more dominant influences for West and a baroque drama began to appear in his work to the extent that a choice of apocalyptic subjects and a more expressive manner of painting is thought to have come partly as a reaction to current events: Goerge III’s bouts of madness and the violence surrounding the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The eventual culmination of this transformation found expression in West’s most famous work: Death on the Pale Horse, a huge, liberated and overwhelming treatment painted with exceptional freedom in 1796 in preparation for the series of subjects from the Revelations commissioned for the Royal Chapel at Windsor. West’s newly gestural form of painting found another devotee in William Beckford who commissioned a considerable range of work (not all completed) for the ill-fated Fonthill abbey. Intriguingly, West’s sketches and drawings for this project appear also to have inspired William Blake. In 1792, West succeeded Sir Joshua Reynolds as President of the Royal Academy and he served in the post for twenty seven not always uncontroversial years.
Despite his royal allegiance and the support of the English establishment, West is said to have remained an American at heart, speaking in 1804 of his dream to return to America and inspire her people in their ‘strong disposition to the Arts’ with a plan to encourage rivalry between the cities of New York and Philadelphia3. Young American artists as a matter of course applied to become West’s pupil on arrival in England, his works were purchased during his lifetime for the Pennsylvania Academy to which he was elected as first honorary member and Death on a Pale Horse was finally bought posthumously and added to the collection as a trophy to their native painter.
This dramatic and impressively large drawing is a rediscovered study for West’s lost painting of Moses and the Brazen Serpent which appears to have been painted to form a triptych with a large painting of The Resurrection and another of St. John the Baptist, also lost, though again now known from a drawing. The Resurrection survives in the church of St. George on Barbados. The published lists of Benjamin West’s works include pictures of Moses and St. John and describe them as being also in Barbados but as no trace of the pictures has been found, it may be that they never reached the island. The Resurrection is dated 1786. That the present work is dated to the following year makes quite understandable its separation from the earlier work. The compositions of the paintingsof Moses and St John the Baptist are thought to be recorded in the engravings by John Hall made for Thomas Macklin’s great illustrated bible which was published in 1800 but the Moses Showing the Brazen Serpent has a number of differences to the present work, the figure is more fully clothed and much heavier and fuller of face, the Moses of the drawing is a wilder, more angular and energetic looking figure and in these characteristics looks more in keeping with the elegant figure of Christ in the Resurrection1. Benjamin West’s technique is here at its most confident, the handling of black chalk is bold and powerful particularly in the concentric loops of the serpents coiling form. The unusual use of white chalk for the squaring was made to contrast with the dominating black shapes of drapery, rocks and clouds. This method was used again by West in a sketch for a Last Judgement2now in the impressive collection of his drawings in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.
Benjamin West played an important role in the popularisation of lithography and his groundbreaking example, The Angel of the Resurrection (507 x 393mm.) is generally considered to be ‘the first lithograph of artistic merit ever done in any country’ as described by Mark Henshaw in his survey3. The ‘bravura directness’, a ‘pen drawing on stone’, which was published in 1801 closely recalls the vertical composition of the present work with its energetic technique and concentration on forceful contrasts of light and dark. Dominating, single or central figures in animated and decisive poses are an absolutely striking feature in West’s oeuvre from the large scale 1806 painting of The Bard inspired by Thomas Gray’s eponymous poem, an earlier sketch for which is in Tate Britain dated 1778 to the 1790 canvas of Moses Showing the Brazen Serpent to the Israelites now in the Bob Jones University, South Carolina, an oil and crayon sketch for which is in the Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts. The latter though coloured and containing many figures is drawn in the same powerful and linear style as the present work.7
1. Quoted in Helmut von Erffa and Allen Stanley, The Paintings of Benjamin West, New Haven and London 1986, p.23.
2. See Effra and Stanley, op. cit., p.42.
3. See Effra and Stanley, op. cit., p.151
4. The St John the Baptist drawing is closer to the related print which also appears in Macklin’s Bible though again the figure is slightly more covered and fuller and heavier in type, see Helmut von Erffa and Allen Staley, op.cit, p.323, under no.297.
5. See Ruth S. Kraemer, Drawings by Benjamin West and his son Raphael Lamar West, Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, 1975, cat.72, p.43 and pl.43.
6. See Mark Henshaw, ‘First Impressions, the early history of lithography – A comparative survey’, Artonview, issue 33, Autumn 2003, p.33-38. Benjamin West, Angel of the Resurrection, lithograph, 507 x 393 mm.
7. See Effra and Stanley, op. cit., cats. 198 and 199 and 266 and 267.
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