The importance of West and Copley, two Americans who were active in England, is that they were the first to apply the qualities acquired in English portrait painting to pictures on a large scale.

Benjamin West has undoubtedly been over-praised by his contemporaries, and by a critic of the present day he has, not unfairly, been designated “the king of mediocrity.” At his appearance he was interesting to Europeans merely as an anthropological curiosity,—as the first son of barbaric America who had used a paint brush. A thoroughly American puff preceded his entry into the Eternal City in 1760. It was reported that as the son of a quaker farmer he had grown up amongst his father’s slaves in the immediate neighbourhood of the Indians, and had painted good portraits in Philadelphia and New York without having ever seen a work of art. People were delighted when, on being brought into the Vatican, he clapped his hands and compared the Apollo Belvidere to an Indian chief. In the art of making himself interesting “the young savage” was ahead of all his patrons; and as he followed the ruling classical tendency with great aptitude, within the course of a year he was made an honorary member of the Academies of Parma, Bologna, and Florence, and praised by the critics of Rome as ranking with Mengs as the first painter of his day. In 1763, at a time when Hogarth and Reynolds, Wilson and Gainsborough, were in the fulness of their powers, he went to London; and as people are always inclined to value most highly what they do not possess, he soon won an important position for himself, even beside these masters. Hogarth produced nothing but “genre pictures,” Wilson only landscapes, and Reynolds and Gainsborough portraits: West brought to the English what they did not as yet possess—a “great art.”

LAWRENCE.   THE ENGLISH MOTHER.

His first picture—in the London National Gallery—“Pylades and Orestes brought as Hostages before Iphigenia,” is a tiresome product of that Classicism which upon the Continent found its principal representatives in Mengs and David: it is stiff in drawing, its composition is suggestive of a bas-relief, and its cold grey colouring is classically academic. His other pictures from antique and sacred history stand much on the same level as those of Wilhelm Kaulbach, with whose works they share their stilted dignity, their systematically antiquarian structure, and their mechanical combination of forms borrowed in a spiritless fashion from the Cinquecentisti.

Fortunately West has left behind him something different from these ambitious attempts; for on the occasions when he turned away from the great style he created works of lasting importance. This is specially true of some fine historical pictures dealing with his own age, which will preserve his name for ever. “The Death of General Wolfe” at the storming of Quebec on 13th September 1759—exhibited at the opening of the Royal Academy in 1768—is by its very sobriety a sincere, honest, and sane piece of work, which will maintain its value as an historical document. It was just at this time that so great a part was played by the question of costume, and West encountered the same difficulties which Gottfried Schadow was obliged to face when he represented Ziethen and the Old Dessauer in the costume of their age. The connoisseurs held that such a sublime theme would only admit of antique dress. If West in their despite represented the general and his soldiers in their regulation uniform, it seems at the present time no more than the result of healthy common sense, but at that time it was an artistic event of great importance, and one which was only accomplished in France after the work of several decades. In that country Gérard and Girodet still clung to the belief that they could only raise the military picture to the level of the great style by giving the soldiers of the Empire the appearance of Greek and Roman statues. Gros is honoured as the man who first ceased from giving modern soldiers an air of the antique. But the American Englishman had anticipated him by forty years. As in Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa,” it was only the pyramidal composition in West’s picture that betrayed the painter’s alliance with the Classical school; in other respects it forecast the realistic programme for decades to come, and indicated the course of development which leads through Gros onwards. If in Gros men are treated purely as accessories to throw a hero into relief, in West they stand out in action. They behave in the picture spontaneously as they do in life. That is to say, there is in West’s work of 1768 the element through which Horace Vernet’s pictures of 1830 are to be distinguished from those of Gros.

This realistic programme was carried out with yet greater consistency by West’s younger compatriot John Singleton Copley, who after a short sojourn in Italy migrated to England in 1775. His chief works in the London National Gallery depict in the same way events from contemporary history—“The Death of the Earl of Chatham, 7th April 1778” and “The Death of Major Pierson, 6th January 1781,”—and it is by no means impossible that when David, in the midst of the classicising tendencies of his age, ventured to paint “The Death of Marat” and “The Death of Lepelletier,” he was led to do so by engravings after Copley. In the representation of such things other painters of the epoch had draped their figures in antique costume, called genii and river-gods into action, and given a Roman character to the whole. Copley, like West, offers a plain, matter-of-fact representation of the event, without any rhetorical pathos. And what raises him above West is his liquid, massive colour, suggestive of the old masters. In none of his works could West set himself free from the dead grey colour of the Classical school, whereas Copley’s “Death of William Pitt” is the result of intimate studies of Titian and the Dutch. The way the light falls on the perukes of the men and the brown, wainscoted walls puts one in mind of Rembrandt’s “Anatomical Lecture”; only, instead of a pathetic scene from the theatre, we have a collection of good portraits in the manner of the Dutch studies of shooting matches.

Mansell Photo
LAWRENCE.CAROLINE OF BRUNSWICK, QUEEN OF GEORGE IV.

LAWRENCE.THE COUNTESS GOWER.