Benjamin West

Benjamin West

(1738-1820)

Benjamin West was born in Springfield, Pennsylvania. From 1760 to 1763 he visited Italy, and his experience there, particularly his exposure to the beginnings of Neoclassicism in Rome, provided the basis of his later career. In 1763 he settled in London and he remained in England for the rest of his life. In 1768 West became a founding member of the English Royal Academy, and in 1792 he became its second president, succeeding Sir Joshua Reynolds. In 1768 he attracted the patronage of George III, for whom he painted some sixty pictures between 1768 and 1801. In 1772 he was named Historical Painter to the King.

In America, West worked primarily as a portraitist. In England, he achieved recognition as a history painter, producing subjects from Greek and Roman history. In 1771 his painting of a recent historical event, The Death of General Wolfe (1770; National Gallery of Canada, Ottowa), achieved instant celebrity. After 1780 a majority of his works were inspired by the Bible. As his subjects changed, his stylistic vocabulary changed as well, becoming increasingly neo-Baroque or proto-Romantic, but at any moment West was capable of chameleonlike stylistic changes, as he responded to different subject matter and artistic influences.

West’s royal commissions ended in 1801 with the failing health of George III, but in the last years of his life he had great public success with three huge Biblical pictures, Christ Healing the Sick (1811, destroyed; an 1815 version is in the Pennsylvania Hospital, Philadelphia), “Christ Rejected” (1814), and “Death on a Pale Horse” (1817); both Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia). After his death his two sons turned his home and studio into a public gallery. When its popularity waned, they sold the works at public auction in 1829.

Thetis Bringing the Armor to Achilles, 1806 or 1808

Oil on canvas, 20 x 27 1/4 in. (63.5 x 69.2 cm)

Signed (lower right): B. West 1806 [1808?]

Charles F. Smith Fund (1942.10)

In the opening lines of the nineteenth book of the “Iliad” by Homer, the Greek hero Achilles has withdrawn from the war with Troy and is grieving over the body of his slain companion Patroclus. To persuade Achilles to return to battle, Thetis, his mother, has had new armor made by Vulcan to replace Achilles’ previous set, which Patroclus had been wearing when he was killed. Achilles’ followers, the Myrmidons, are fearful of the shiny new armor.

Of the several known or recorded pictures by West showing Thetis bringing the armor, only the New Britain work includes the Myrmidons. The treatment of the main figures-Thetis, Achilles, and the corpse of Patroclus-is basically the same as it is in West's initial depiction of the subject, a large picture exhibited at the Royal Academy, London, in 1805, THAT has disappeared but is known through engravings and copies. (1) West exhibited a second painting of the subject at the Royal Academy in 1805 and a third, in 1808. The New Britain picture may have been the version shown in 1808. While the final digit in the date on the canvas can be interpreted as a 6 or an 8, either reading precludes identification of the work as being one of the paintings exhibited in 1805. In addition, several purportedly complete lists of West’s works were drawn up and published between 1802 and 1808. The last of them, published in 1808 in “La Belle Assemblee, or Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine” is the only one that includes “the small picture of Thetis bringing the armour to Achilles in which the Myrmidons are introduced.” This reference must be to the New Britain picture, which evidently was only recently completed in 1808, too late to have appeared in any of the other, earlier lists.

West initially made his reputation in the late 1760s with “Agrippina Landing at Brundisium with the Ashes of Germanicus” (1768; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven), which is among the important early monuments of the Neoclassical style that dominated European art in the late eighteenth century and the early years of the nineteenth. Following the great success of his modern-life history painting “The Death of General Wolfe” (1770; National Gallery of Canada, Ottowa), he moved away from classical subject matter. By 1790 such themes had virtually disappeared from his oeuvre, but about 1800 he began to return to classical subjects. The group of paintings devoted to Thetis and Achilles, painted some forty years after “Agrippina”, are his most ambitious later ventures in this vein. West’s renewed interest in classical subjects was probably inspired by the series of outline engravings illustrating the Iliad and the Odyssey published in 1793 after designs by the Englishman John Flaxman and by the Neoclassical paintings of Jacques-Louis David and his followers, which West saw in Paris in 1802.

Both Flaxman and the French artists practiced more severe, archaeologically precise, and abstract formal classicism than West had in his earlier paintings, and this later influence is reflected in the essentially two-dimensional composition, the pronounced emphasis on outline, and the compact quasigeometrical arrangement of the main figures in the New Britain picture as well as in such details as Thetis’s profile, Achilles’ nudity, and the elaboration of the sword, shield, and helmet. Achilles’ glowering expression, extended leg, and brooding posture are prefigured in “Phaedra and Hippolytus” (1822; Museé du Louvre, Paris) by Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, which West saw and admired in the Salon of 1802 in Paris.

The New Britain picture was not painted on commission, and it remained in the possession of the artist and his heirs until 1829. The first version was one of three works commissioned from West by Thomas Hope, a leading figure in the Greek revival of the early nineteenth century and a scholar who published a two-volume Costume of the Ancients in 1809 as well as later works devoted to antique furniture and decoration. We do not know if Hope dictated the subject or if West chose it in order to appeal to Hope’s known interests.

Whereas West’s earlier pictures, such as “Agrippina” are all variants of the Neoclassical “exemplum virtutis”, (3) focusing on the high-minded and patriotic actions of their protagonists whose self-sacrifice and devotion to duty served as models of behavior, his Achilles is a reluctant hero who must be bribed by his mother to do his duty--hardly a role model for anyone. Rather than a celebration of virtue, the picture is about a tormented, disobedient, and unhappy man. Achilles has become a romantic hero whose soulmates are Milton’s Satan from “Paradise Lost” and Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Coriolanus, characters who have trouble making up their minds, all of whom were the subjects of ambitious paintings exhibited between 1797 and 1801 by Thomas Lawrence, probably the most admired and respected younger artist in England at the turn of the century. (4)

Yet “Thetis Bringing the Armor to Achilles” did have a timely message about duty. Between 1793 and 1815 England and France were almost constantly at war. The only significant break in the fighting was the brief Peace of Amiens of 1802, which allowed West and other English artists to visit Paris. By the beginning of 1805, hostilities had resumed and Britain was preparing for an invasion by Napoleon’s armies. In West’s pictures showing Thetis urging her son to return to battle, conceived and begun at precisely that moment, the implicit call to arms is clear. In the first version and in the New Britain picture, Achilles is brooding and shows no visible interest in what Thetis has brought him, but in yet another version of the subject, which was probably West’s second treatment of the subject exhibited in 1805, Achilles has taken the helmet in one hand, raises the sword above his head with the other, and is manifestly on his way to do battle with the Trojans.

The introduction of ten Myrmidons into the New Britain picture, eight on the left side and two on the right behind the body of Patroclus, transforms the earlier vertical compositions into a horizontal one. The armor, freshly made by Vulcan, lovingly described by Homer, and faithfully re-created by the artist, is clearly meant to be beautiful and to represent West’s conception of the highest achievements in ancient craftsmanship and design. These objects are to be appreciated aesthetically, not feared; nevertheless, the “Iliad” is explicit about the Myrmidons’ fright: “Trembling took hold of all the Myrmidons. None had the courage to look straight at it. They were afraid of it.” (5) Their gestures and expressions recall similar responses of spectators before miraculous or terrifying events in other paintings by West, notably the terror of Saul’s companions in “Saul and the Witch of Endor” (1777; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford). What partly explains such ancillary figures in many late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century paintings is the notion of the “Sublime” propounded by Edmund Burke in his influential “Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful” (1757). Burke defined Sublimity as the opposite of beauty, yet it bears equal aesthetic power stemming from our psychological responses to what we perceive as threatening. Pictures showing terrifying apparitions, natural disasters, and the like can often be related to Burke’s ideas, and, since the theory was about responses, many of those pictures show not only something to terrify us but also terrified observers whose reactions we can observe and share.

AS

Bibliography:

Ruth S. Kraemer, “Drawings by Benjamin West and His Son Raphael Lamar West” (New York: Pierpont Morgan Library, 1975); Ann Uhry Abrams, “The Valiant Hero: Benjamin West and Grand-Style History Painting” (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985); Helmut von Erffa and Allen Staley, “The Paintings of Benjamin West” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Allen Staley, “Benjamin West, American Painter at the English Court”, exhib.cat. (Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 1989).

Notes:

1. Von Erffa and Staley, “Paintings of Benjamin West”, p. 252, no. 170. Other versions are discussed and illustrated in ibid., pp. 252-55, nos. 171-75. For related drawings, see Kraemer, Drawings, nos. 74-81.

2 . “A Correct Catalogue of the Works of Benjamin West, Esq.,” “La Belle Assembl`ee; or, Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine 4 “(1808), supp., p. 20.

3 . Robert Rosenblum, “Transformations in Late Eighteenth-Century Art “(Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp. 50-106.

4 . “Satan Calling His Legions” (Royal Academy, London), exhibited 1797; “Mr. Kemble as Coriolanus, at the Hearth of Tullus Ausidius” (Guildhall Art Gallery, London), exhibited 1798; and “Hamlet” (Tate Gallery, London), exhibited 1801.

5 . Richmond Lattimore, trans., “The Iliad of Homer” (Chicago/and London: University of Chicago Press, 1951), p. 392 (bk. 19, 1l. 14-15).