Double Vision: “Seeing Double” at the Yale Center for British Art

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then John Scarlett Davis must have been the sincerest flatterer in all of England in 1829. In the exhibition Seeing Double: Portraits, Copies and Exhibitions in 1820s London, the Yale Center for British Art solves the “puzzle” of Davis’s painting The Interior of the British Institution Gallery (shown), which caused a stir in the London art scene of 1829 in ostensibly recreating an exhibition of Old Masters hosted in 1829 by the British Institution, a London-based art organization run by collectors and connoisseurs. “Ostensibly” becomes the key word in examining Davis’ painting, as the Yale Center’s research shows just what kind of liberties Davis took in his recreation and to what ends he took those liberties. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Double Vision."

[Image: John Scarlett Davis, The Interior of the British Institution Gallery, 1829. Oil on canvas. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.]



[Many thanks to the Yale Center for British Art for providing me with press materials for Seeing Double: Portraits, Copies and Exhibitions in 1820s London, which runs through September 19, 2010.]

Madman Across the Water

In May 1809, William Blake set up an exhibition of his works in a room above his brother’s hosiery shop in the house in which he was born and raised. Few people came to see the sixteen oddly beautiful works hung there, fewer picked up the Descriptive Catalogue Blake has written and printed to help explain his works, and even fewer bought anything. The sole review of the show published in The Examiner called the paintings “the wild effusions of a distempered brain.” Visitors straggled through as late as June 1810 to see the works. The length of the exhibition, however, marked not public interest but Blake’s own disappointment and wish to forget the hanging entirely. Two centuries later, the Tate Britain has recreated Blake’s failed show in an exhibition and Martin Myrone resurrects Blake’s weird and wonderful catalogue in William Blake’s Seen in My Visions: A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures. Through Myrone’s scholarly introduction and editing of Blake’s own effusions, we can travel back in time to see works such as Blake’s The Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan (above, from 1805-1809) as Blake’s contemporaries may have seen them. Myrone paints Blake’s 1809 fiasco as a turning point in the poet-artists’ career in which the Blake we have come to know and love today is seen as just one of the many possible “Blakes” that could have come down to us.

Blake always thought on a cosmic level, and this exhibition aimed no lower. In his introduction, Myrone calls Blake’s 1809 exhibition “not merely a celebration of an artist’s work, a straightforward retrospective of a career, but an agenda-setting, forcefully polemical intervention into the art world, and an enterprise aimed at reforming not only the tastes of the public, but their morality as well, through the revival of the ‘grand style’ in art.” In Blake’s black and white world of art and morality, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Durer emerge as the heroes of the grand style, whereas Titian, Rubens, Correggio, and Rembrandt represent the weaker elements that have cheapened art and drained the energy from public morality. Blake specifically challenged the art and morality of his time by “calling out” artists, including one-time friend Thomas Stothard, by interpreting subjects in his own “grand style” way. Blake’s The Canterbury Pilgrims (above, from 1808) challenges the more conventional rendering of Stothard by going bigger and bolder and attempting to convey the human drama embedded in Chaucer’s famous work. “He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light than his perishing mortal eye can see,” Blake writes in his catalogue, “does not imagine at all.” Anyone who loves Blake’s almost superhuman confidence in his poetry will eat up similar brashness in the catalogue. When Blake decries other artists “laboring to destroy Imaginative power, by means of that infernal machine, called Chairo Oscuro,” it’s easy to forget that Caravaggio, the king of chiaroscuro, languished in near obscurity in the 1800s, remembered mostly through his imitators. I also wonder what Blake’s friend, Henry Fuseli, himself a fan of chiaroscuro’s effects, may have thought of Blake’s “infernal” judgment. Blake never pulled his punches. Seen in My Visions allows you to step in the ring with the poetic pugilist for as many rounds as you can stand.

Of the sixteen works shown in 1809, eleven survive, including Blake’s The Soldiers Casting Lots for Christ's Garments (above, from 1800). The survivors show Blake’s work in tempera on canvas and watercolor on paper. Blake disdained oil painting as a symptom of art’s decline. Fresco, the medium for Michelangelo and Raphael, was forever, and Blake desired nothing less than eternity. In 1809, Blake still imagined a place in the mainstream art world for himself. None of the works shown in 1809 relate to the poetry Blake was writing and would later illustrate himself, gaining the fame he now enjoys posthumously. Chaucer, Thomas Gray, and the Bible provided the subject matter for Blake’s art. I found it difficult imagining a “Blake” different than the “Blake” I know so well, but Myrone convincingly argues for the possibility of at least one “Blake” that could have been. One of the lost works, titled Ancient Britons and standing at 3 meters high by 4 meters long, broke all the rules of what a “Blake” is known as. “A privately commissioned painting on a serious historic subject, painted in a severely classical style, full of patriot feeling, and completed on a very large scale,” Myrone describes Ancient Britons from the surviving clues. “If the picture had survived, our image of Blake might be quite radically different: he would be placed even more readily in the company of [James] Barry and Fuseli than he is now.” Would such a “Blake” be better or worse? If Ancient Britons were to reemerge from obscurity tomorrow, would the familiar “Blake” of soaring visions and stubborn independence be lost for good?

In the end, however, despite dreams of a parallel universe in which Blake and James Barry sit cozily beside each other in a prosaic list of painters of the period, we are left with the only Blake we know. After the failure of the 1809 show, Blake turned his back on the conventional art world. He participated in only one more exhibition in 1812. When Sir Joshua Reynolds, official tastemaker of Blake’s time and gatekeeper for artistic success, published his lectures, Blake annotated them with the bitter marginalia of a outsider with no hope of finding his way in. Seen in My Visions shows Blake at his visionary best, especially in works such as Christ in the Sepulchre, Guarded by Angels (above, from 1805), but also at his pragmatic best, wishing for a way to become an insider without compromising his principles so as to better art and society from within the machinery itself. Even Blake knew that access to the inner workings of the system was the only way to change it. Denied the chance even to touch the levers of power, Blake forged a different path, lighting a long fuse for an artistic and philosophical bomb that would take decades to detonate and contribute to change. Even two centuries later, Blake explodes in our imaginations like few other artists. The exhibition and catalogue Seen in My Visions shows that Blake didn’t begin as a bomb thrower into the future.


[Many thanks to Tate Publishing for providing me with a review copy of William Blake’s Seen in My Visions: A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures, edited by Martin Myrone.]

Female Persuasion

Because of her thirty portraits of Marie Antoinette and her family painted over a span of just six years (including the 1783 portrait above), Elizabeth-Louise Vigee-Lebrun’s legacy is heavily linked to the fortunes of that doomed queen. Born April 16, 1755, Vigee-Lebrun ranks among the greatest women artists of the nineteenth century, and is undoubtedly the queen of the Rococo style, with Jean-Honore Fragonard as its king. She first learned painting from her father, who was a fan painter, and later met Gabriel François Doyen, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Joseph Vernet, and other prominent male French artists. However, Vigee-Lebrun made her name by painting the most fascinating women of her time, including Marie Antoinette. Even in pre-Revolutionary France, women artists enjoyed an increased degree of freedom and opportunity, yet still not equal to that offered to men. Recognizing a shift in the sexual balance, Vigee-Lebrun hitched her wagon to some of the greatest female stars of her time. She paired her soft yet abundant style to the effusive personalities of these other great women to create portraits that fully capture their personalities and place in the period.

Emma, Lady Hamilton was the “It girl” of the Neoclassical strain of Romanticism. Born Emy Lyon, “Emma” used her beauty and charm to rise through the ranks of British society. Her marriage to the elderly William, Lord Hamilton was made to save the reputation of a younger relation. Lord Hamilton looked the other way as Emma conducted a lengthy affair with Lord Nelson that led to the birth of two illegitimate children. Emma Hamilton also served as a model for artists such as George Romney, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Vigee-Lebrun. Vigée-Lebrun’s portrait of Lady Hamilton as Ariadne (above, from 1790) shows Emma caught in one of her “Attitudes,” in which she donned classical-looking dress and struck a pose. These “Attitudes” helped stoke the flames of Neoclassicism in Europe, turning even the head of Goethe and even leading to a kind of fashion craze. Even in heavy drapery, Emma Hamilton exuded sex. There’s always a hint of the erotic beneath all the finery in Rococo art, but Vigee-Lebrun’s portrait of Lady Hamilton as Ariadne gets straight to the point.

While Emma Hamilton stimulated the libido of the times, Madame de Staël stimulated the imagination. Vigee-Lebrun painted Madame de Staël as Corinne (above, from 1808) to allude to de Staël’s 1807 novel of the same name starring a young woman named Corinne. Named after the ancient Greek poet Corina, Corrine takes the Grand Tour with gusto, leaving behind her a trail of lovers, none of whom admired her for her mind as much as her beauty. Napoleon objected to the feminist perspective of de Staël’s novel so strongly that he had the author exiled from France in 1810. Like Marie Antoinette and Emma Hamiton, de Staël represents the strong woman of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. If the term feminism had been coined, they would all have been considered feminists on one level or another. Marie Antoinette may seem a strange feminist figure, but her outsider status in the court of Louis XVI and her hands-on approach to the education of her children make her more nuanced and approachable than the “Let them eat cake!” cartoon figure of legend. Vigee-Lebrun not only furthered the possibilities for herself and other women artists, but also provided examples of women persuading the world to follow a new course of gender equity.

Power Player

I got a lot of funny looks when I gushed over a portrait by Thomas Lawrence while attending a wedding last November. In an upstairs gallery of the mansion where the wedding took place, a portrait by Lawrence that I had never seen stood beside examples by Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, and Allan Ramsay, reuniting the four greatest British portraitists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Born April 13, 1769, Lawrence may have been the most talented of the bunch, a child prodigy who started drawing pastels of the patrons of his father’s inn and rose to become painter to first King George III and later King George IV . Lawrence’s portrait of Caroline Amelia Elizabeth of Brunswick (above, from 1804) shows the future queen consort of George IV in younger days. Lawrence alludes to her troubled marriage to the wild Prince Regent by placing her left hand, upon which she wore her wedding ring, in dark shadow. The full extent of Caroline’s marital woes most likely reached Lawrence’s ear during sittings for many portraits over the years. Rumors persist that Lawrence and Caroline even carried on an affair. If so, it was just another self-destructive behavior for Lawrence, who allowed alcoholism and financial irresponsibility to limit how far he could take his gift.

After the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the Prince Regent IV commissioned Lawrence to paint all the great European heads of state involved in that victory, who had gathered together at the Congress of Vienna. Lawrence painted Pope Pius VII (above) in 1819. Pius VII received credit for fighting Napoleon in the end, although he attended Napoleon’s self-coronation and played ball with the emperor when it suited papal purposes. The real importance of Lawrence’s portrait of Pope Pius VII comes in the amazing fluidity of the drapery and textures. Lawrence recognized the great potential of popish pomp and squeezed every last ounce of juice out of it. Always aware of the history of art, Lawrence measured his achievement against that of Raphael’s Julius II, Titian’s Paul III, and Velázquez’ Innocent X. Lawrence owned one of the finest collections of Old Master drawings in the world, so the greats of the past were always near at hand. A classicist at heart, Lawrence even helped acquire (for good or ill) the Elgin Marbles for England. Lawrence produced many non-portrait works of great beauty and power, but it was with his portraits that he made his fame and fortune, thus overshadowing the depth of this great, forgotten master.

I like to compare Lawrence with John Singer Sargent. Both owned immense, precocious talent that made their art seem lightweight and all surface with no depth. Both, however, were more than just portraitists of the rich and famous, as scholars now struggle to establish. Lawrence’s portrait of Margaret, Countess of Blessington (above, from 1822) certainly captures the surface flash of her good looks and beautiful finery, but it also reproduces the vivacity of her personally. Host of one of the foremost literary salons of her day, Lady Blessington was much more than a pretty face. The first time I saw a portrait by Lawrence it was this sense of life in the eyes that intrigued me to learn more about him and his art. Sadly, I’ve also seen some lesser Lawrence, including the portrait at that wedding, which seemed a later work, when Lawrence’s light was beginning to dim. It’s amazing to tally up just how much a simple innkeeper son achieved through artistic talent and personal charisma (he almost became an actor!), but even that seems a paltry sum considering just how far he could have gone.

Kingmaker

The Van Dyck and Britain exhibition currently at the Tate Britain rightfully places Anthony Van Dyck at the origin of the golden age of eighteenth century portraiture in England, the “father” of Reynolds, Gainsborough, Ramsay, and Lawrence. Born March 22, 1599, while his contemporary Diego Velázquez – aggrandized in paint Philip IV of Spain, Van Dyck depicted King Charles I of England and Scotland to his best advantage. Sensing the increasing weakness of the Catholic Church as the Protestant Reformation dragged on, European monarch seized the opportunity to employ the fine arts for propaganda much as popes had for centuries. Van Dyck’s Charles I of England at the Hunt (above, from 1635) shows the king in all his merciless glory, celebrating the murderous hunt with a sneer. Charles I subscribed to the idea of the Divine Right of Kings, that god-given right of royalty to the throne that no earthly power could deny. Charles I fought with anyone and everyone, including his own parliament. Popularity was not a priority. Van Dyck here lavishes on the king the brilliant brushwork he learned from Peter Paul Rubens, giving the mortal king an almost mythical sheen reserved for Olympic gods. Charles I, of course, believed it was his due.

During his reign it was almost as if Charles I courted controversy. He married Henrietta Maria of France, a Catholic, over the objections of parliament and the English people, who were weary of decades of religious strife tearing the nation apart. Van Dyck painting of Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria with Charles, Prince of Wales and Princess Mary (above, from 1632) stood as a big middle finger to the country. Charles I set Van Dyck up as the official court painter and provided him with a studio close enough that the royals could walk back and forth from their regular sittings. Van Dyck became absurdly rich by the standards of artists of the time and even scored a knighthood for his work. Soon the appeal of being painted by Van Dyck spread to the rest of English nobility and Van Dyck became the go-to artist for those looking to immortalize their social standing.


Making Charles I look good was literally a tall order. To create the illusion of grandeur for a king that stood less than five feet tall, as Charles I did, Van Dyck resorted to many tricks, the most notable of which was the equestrian portrait. Van Dyck’s Charles I on Horseback (above, from 1635) raises the king up while lowering the sights of the viewer. The low horizon makes us feel as if we’re standing at stirrup level, craning our neck up at a towering monarch rather than a diminutive despot. Charles I’s antics eventually led to the English Civil War and the Cromwellian Interregnum. After a series of battles, Charles I was captured and tried and literally cut down to size—headfirst. The head that Van Dyck painted over and over fell victim to regicide. After Charles II regained the throne in 1660, Charles I was canonized by the Church of England, but Van Dyck had canonized him long before.

Flesh for Fantasy

When William Blake calls you an influence, you know your art is unique. Henry Fuseli, born Johann Heinrich Füssli on February 7, 1741 in Zurich, Switzerland, left his greatest impression on the art world of England. Fuseli’s best-known painting, The Nightmare (above, from 1781), contains all the typical hallmarks of the Fuseli style—macabre, nightmarish subject matter; wonderfully rich colors and textures; and almost Michelangelo-esquely expressive nudes or near-nudes. The woman in The Nightmare wears a dress so shear that she might as well be nude. Fuseli remains significant today not only because of the psychological impact and beautiful technique of the works but also for his place in the early days of the Romantic art movement that would sweep across nineteenth-century Europe and echo through Western art ever since. Friend to figures such as pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (whose portrait he painted), her husband, writer and philosopher William Godwin, scientist Joseph Priestley, philosopher Erasmus Darwin, and essayist Thomas Paine, Fuseli helped stage the nightmare of European royalty that Romanticism became in its revolutionary form.

A friend with a much greater appreciation of the fantasy art world recently clued me onto amazing artists such as Michael Parkes and Jeffrey Catherine Jones, whom my friend called “a feminine Frank Frazetta.” I remember buying Conan the Barbarian magazines as a kid and staring at the incredible Frazetta fantasy art (and not just because of Red Sonja). In many ways, Fuseli is the Frazetta of his time, illustrating many classic works of fiction in an imaginative style beyond the works themselves. Working in England, Fuseli couldn’t avoid illustrating the works of William Shakespeare and contributed to a famous Shakespeare Gallery of the time. Fuseli later opened his own gallery featuring his illustrations of John Milton, which were just as amazing as his Shakespeare-inspired paintings but not as commercially successful. I’ve always been drawn to Fuseli’s depictions of Homer’s Iliad, such as Sleep and Death Carrying Away Sarpedon of Lycia (above, from 1803). Sarpedon, a mortal son of Zeus, dies while fighting for the Trojans at the hands of Patroclus. Zeus morns the death of his son and showers the Trojans with bloody raindrops as his tears before asking Sleep and Death to carry Sarpedon’s corpse away. If the Iliad is the original sword and sorcerer tale, then Fuseli is the original Frazetta. The amazing foreshortening of Sarpedon’s lifeless leg brings to mind the finest of the Renaissance draftsmen.

Death and the afterlife may have held a special significance for Fuseli. Before becoming a painter, Fuseli studied to become a priest, even taking orders before having to flee his native Switzerland and become a nomadic writer and artist. Sir Joshua Reynolds, ironically Blake’s antithesis, recognized Fuseli’s talent early on and encouraged him to study art full time, which led Fuseli to make a pilgrimage to Italy and learn from the works of the Renaissance masters. In works such as The Apotheosis of Penelope Boothby (above, from 1792), we see the Renaissance religious sensibility translated by Fuseli into the late Romantic idiom. The angel could easily have fallen from a sixteenth century altarpiece, but the woman clearly rises from the late eighteenth century. Fuseli channels his religious fervor into artistic fervor, making a god of imagery to generate a fantasy of a better place in a world that sometimes seemed godless. I don’t know how strong a believer Fuseli was, but I believe in the power of his images to build entire worlds that seem strangely possible.

The Art of Love

Ovid’s got nothing on this pair. Many years of love and laughter to Lisa and Paul (above). Annie and I attended their beautiful wedding at the majestic Glen Foerd Mansion just north of Philadelphia along the Delaware River. From the elegant ceremony to the great food to the riotous dancing, it was a night to remember for everyone. (Annie thinks Lisa’s a genius for circumventing the whole “who’s going to sit with whom” drama of a seating arrangement by letting people sit wherever and with whomever they wanted.)

An added delight for me was the chance to see the mansion’s art gallery. Annie and I made our way upstairs to the gallery during the cocktail hour and the first thing that caught my eye was a large portrait centered on the far wall. I immediately said to Annie, “That’s a Lawrence!” And it was by Sir Thomas Lawrence, one of my favorite portraitists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. (I wasn’t allowed to take photos in the gallery, but a photo appears here. The Lawrence is the large full-figure portrait at the end of the hall flanked by two smaller portraits.) In terms of composition and style, the Glen Foerd portrait reminded me of Lawrence’s portrait of Elizabeth Farren at the Met, but this portrait didn’t have the same liveliness. Lawrence at his best paints eyes with a startling energy and life, but these were a little lifeless, leading me to suspect that it was a later, lesser work, but still interesting. Surrounding the Lawrence were examples of the work of all the other great British portraitists of the period: Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, and Allan Ramsey (a portrait of Queen Charlotte herself). The Big Four of the time of King George III were all there.

Annie and I then toured the room and saw a Rembrandt (or at least attributed to the school of Rembrandt), a Rubens, an early Van Gogh from the early The Potato Eaters period, and a Monet landscape. My head was still spinning as Annie and I made our way down the stairs for the toasts and post-cocktail hour festivities.

So, once again, all the best, Lisa and Paul, and thanks for giving us a night out without Alex and a chance to see the beauty of the past as well as the beginning of your beautiful future together. Cheers!

No Ordinary Painter

After taking the Grand Tour, and painting the portraits of others on that nineteenth century rite of cultural passage, Allan Ramsay found himself named “Painter in Ordinary” to England’s King George III, besting the greatest portraitists in England for the post. Born October 17, 1713, Ramsay painted the king in full regalia in his Portrait of George III (above, from 1762). Since the days of Elizabeth I, royal portraiture carried a giant load of metaphorical weight. Ramsay’s relaxed, warm style suited the new “look” that the king wanted for himself and the royal family—still seated firmly in the position of power but also conscious of the oncoming Age of Enlightenment and its challenges to entrenched, enthroned authority. Whereas Elizabeth I requested portraits posing her literally astride the globe like a colossus with all traces of humanity covered up by voluminous gowns, George III wanted viewers to see him as a man first and foremost, albeit a man with considerable power. Ramsay, the “Painter in Ordinary,” made the ordinary look extraordinary with his own extraordinary skills.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, and Sir Thomas Lawrence would follow Ramsay’s lead as they founded the golden age of British portraiture in the generation just after Ramsay’s peak years. That trio followed Ramsay not only in portraying the trappings of power, but also in painting more tender, “behind the throne” scenes such as Ramsay’s Queen Charlotte with her Two Children (above, from 1765). Queen Charlotte widely patronized the arts and clearly recognized the more subtle skills of Ramsay. Instead of asking for the royal treatment, Queen Charlotte chose to have her and her two children painted more naturally, as if they were simply a well-off mother with her beloved children and not the queen and the heirs to the throne. Ramsay’s skill in painting the children with the same tenderness shown to them by their mother matches the attentiveness he gives to the beautiful fabrics they wear.

Ramsay’s talents extended beyond just the visual arts. Like his father, also Allan Ramsay, Ramsay wrote poetry and dabbled in other forms of writing, cultivating the rich, cultured existence of a gentleman of the time. Ramsay certainly knew the works of David Hume when he painted his portrait (above) in 1766. Hume’s naturalistic philosophy based on the idea that reality is only what we perceive empirically and not something we can reason out, succinctly described in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (bane of freshman Philosophy students everywhere, myself included), fits in well with Ramsay’s style of painting. Rather than construct a grand narrative and alter the facts to fit that narrative, Ramsay instead painted exactly what was before him—the grand and the small, the superhuman and the humanly fragile. The gentle treatment of Hume in his portrait may attest to Ramsay’s finding of a kindred spirit in the philosopher. Sadly, Ramsay fell from a ladder in 1770 and injured his painting arm beyond repair. After finishing one last royal portrait despite excruciating pain, Ramsay left his post and an assistant completed the unfinished works. Ramsay spent his final years in Italy, writing and reading yet always pining for the days when he could paint the ordinary in his extraordinary fashion.

Blind Ambition

When Benjamin West burst onto the English art scene in 1763, the brash American with a head full of Raphael and Titian thanks to his recent travels in Italy made few friends when King George III commissioned West to paint the royal family. Sir Joshua Reynolds and others turned their backs on the young artist they saw as too ambitious in infringing upon “their” territory. By 1768, however, West’s personal charm and artistic talent won the English artists over and he joined them in founding the Royal Academy of Arts, eventually succeeding his friend Reynolds as the academy’s second president in 1792. Born October 10, 1738, West stands as one of the first great American artists, yet the majority of his great works have nothing to do with America. West’s breakout work The Death of General Wolfe (above, from 1770) turned heads with its dramatic rendition of the final moments of the life of British General James Wolfe during the Battle of Quebec. By posing Wolfe as a fallen Christ figure, literally ripping off the composition and figures of the Renaissance, West fit in with the art ethos of the time in history painting. However, by allowing the figures to wear contemporary dress and not shrouding them in the togas of classicism, West changed the rules of the game, ambitiously aiming at a type of realism not seen before in history painting that opened the doors for Jacques-Louis David and his Neoclassicism on the verge of Romanticism.

Growing up in Philadelphia, it was hard not to see the works of West. The PAFA features two works by West that bookend their main staircase. To see these huge works you almost have to stand on the opposite side of the stairs, since there’s not enough room to back away from them without tumbling over the railing. A smaller work at the PAFA, West’s The Treaty of Penn with the Indians (above, from 1771-1772), presents an idealized version of the transaction in which William Penn secured land from the Native Americans to extend Pennsylvania. West reportedly first learned how to mix colors from the Native Americans living in Springfield, Pennsylvania, his birthplace (not far from where I live today). Like Penn, West was a Quaker and applied that sect’s principles of brotherhood and pacifism to Native Americans even when most whites considered them less than human.

It’s easy to discount the works of West today. Although he was hailed as “the American Raphael” in his day, many of his figures in his epic-sized works seem cartoonishly stilted today. The great draftsmanship of smaller works such as his altarpiece titled The Conversion of St. Paul (above, from 1786) is largely forgotten today, although he exhibited it to great acclaim during his lifetime. If critics can’t be converted to West’s talent, they should at least be open to accepting his role as a pivotal figure in early American painting. While living in London, West opened his doors to any American artist looking for guidance or a place to stay on their way to study in Europe. Such artists as Gilbert Stuart, Charles Willson Peale, John Singleton Copley, Washington Allston, John Trumbull, Thomas Sully, and Samuel F. B. Morse all spent time in West’s studio and home, learning with the master. Matthew Pratt actually painted a tribute to West’s open house titled The American School. Like later critics, many of these artists rejected West’s teachings after accepting his kindness, but West had greater ambitions for American art than the simple continuation of his personal style.