Benjamin west biography

Benjamin West was born on Oct. Though the Wests lived among Quakers, who habitually frowned upon art, Benjamin seems to have been encouraged by all about him from the time he began to draw at the age of six years. He gained a reputation in eastern Pennsylvania as a child prodigy.

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At first he was self-taught, but later, before his departure for Italy in , he knew the paintings of William Williams and Gustavus Hessalius, whose work he soon surpassed. Among West's American works produced during the s were the Death of Socrates, forecasting his later neoclassic work; a somewhat fantastic Landscape with Cow , revealing his early dreams of storybook castles; and a lustrous portrait of the young Thomas Mifflin.

While in Pennsylvania, West aspired to be the companion of emperors and kings. He sought, then, the social opportunities which Europe offered. Because of his quaint charm and the remoteness of his origins in the eyes of the Italians , West interested important patrons, critics, and literati in Rome. Cardinal Albani introduced him to the treasures of the Vatican; and the English painter Gavin Hamilton, the German painter Anton Raphael Mengs , and the esthetician Johann Joachim Winckelmann schooled West in the niceties of neoclassic art, which was then supplanting the more frivolous rococo style.

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Excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum had fostered the growth of neoclassicism, and partisans of the new nationalisms saw in the glories of the ancient world pretexts for their own ambitions. When West arrived in London in , he was prepared by temperament and training for the success he would enjoy. He was immediately encouraged by Joshua Reynolds and was deluged by portrait commissions.

But he aspired to history painting, which he saw as a higher art form than portraiture. He wished to choose lofty themes, idealize figures, and dramatize scenes according to the principles he had learned in Rome. Robert Hay Drummond, Archbishop of York, commissioned West to paint Agrippina with the Ashes of Germanicus , a story, of faithfulness and self-sacrifice based on a theme from Tacitus.

West endowed his figures with a grave dignity, clearly stratified his space in the manner of Nicolas Poussin , and took his composition, in part, from the ancient reliefs of the Ara Pacis in Rome.