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!”