Saylor.org ARTH207: "Benjamin West"

This lecture is entitled Benjamin West. Why was the contemporary so innovative? So today we're going to focus on Benjamin West who you see over here in a self-portrait, and he's a really interesting character because he's sort of an international person, and he's sort of typical of what's going on in England and America towards the end of the 18th century. So to give you a quick sense of his biography and his background, he was born in Pennsylvania Pennsylvania. He then later trained in Philadelphia, and he was born in Springfield, Pennsylvania, so not in Philadelphia. Springfield. He trained in Philadelphia as well as in Italy. He kind of toured around Italy, and then he made his career, ultimately a very successful career, in England. So he kind of has one foot on either side of the Atlantic. And like I said, he was really successful. He helped to found the Royal Academy in England and later became its president after Reynolds, who we've already looked at, and he earned the patronage of King George III. So you can't really get more successful than that in terms of having really important, powerful, wealthy patrons. So he's a really interesting, successful character, and he's kind of sort of American and sort of British. So he's really interesting in that way. And let's take a look now at what is definitely his most famous painting, and that is a painting known as The Death of General Wolfe. So here is The Death of General Wolfe, and I'll write that down for you really quickly. The Death of General Wolfe, and it dates to 1770. So I think you can see right away, and the title kind of gives it away, we're looking at a death scene here. And right in the center of the composition is this man, General Wolfe, swooning in his last moments of life, just before his death. And you kind of, if you look around at the background and some of the details of what's going on, the way these people are dressed, what they're holding, you can tell this is a battle scene, and this poor character's untimely end. However, this was a successful battle for Britain, and it depicts the end of the battle for Quebec when they defeated the French, which was a real important turning point in this war. So, although he's dying, it's sort of a sweet death, because we know he's achieved what he wanted to achieve here. What's interesting about this painting, and what makes it so famous, might not be immediately apparent to us, to typical contemporary viewers in the 21st century. So what's interesting about this is, think about some of the grand history paintings we've been looking at in this course, that show similar moments in history. Typically, they would have depicted in one of three ways, right? We have commonly the use of allegory, right? Where something is something else, right? A person is depicted as victory, the idea of victory, or peace, or some grander idea like that. You might have a painting like this, of a historical moment depicted in a classical setting, as though you're looking at history. Or you would have a very straightforward, historically accurate depiction of the event, without some of those grander overlays of allegory or classicism. And what's interesting is that this painting does all three at once. So we have, you can see right away, figures in contemporary dress. We can recognize these are soldiers from around this time. So in that way, we've got the straightforward reporting, but they're shown in what is clearly sort of a classical language, right? The way these figures are set up, and their poses, is like a classical image. Images from classical art, classical tradition. And interestingly, there's also a little bit of allegory, too. Notably, if you look at this character here, the Native American figure at the bottom left, he is a real person. He is a person who might have been at this battle. But he places this in North America, for whoever might not have been aware of that. He's a symbol of this place. Similarly, General Wolfe in the center here. He's obviously General Wolfe. He's actually the real person. But he's also a little bit of an allegory of a bigger idea, and that idea would be martyrdom. It's especially interesting to keep that in mind as you as we look at this next image. Here we go. Let's look at these really quickly. Okay, so on the left we have the death of General Wolfe. This is actually a Renaissance painting from the 1430s, and it shows an image of Christ in the center. Sort of the ultimate martyr in the Western art tradition. You can see the way his arms are posed in this image, which was a really common pose for images of Christ, the dead Christ, in art history. If you look over at General Wolfe, he's in roughly the same pose with even his bent legs, the way his arm is curved and one arm straight. So this was a really identifiable visual cue to almost anyone at the time. West is borrowing from this tradition to make this point that Wolfe, yes, Wolfe is a man, but yes, Wolfe is also connected with this tradition, and he's an allegorical figure because of that. So let's go back to this bigger image of the painting. So we went at the beginning of this lecture, I said, why was the contemporary so innovative? I think hopefully now you can see why. We have a really unique and innovative combination of traditional elements, allegory, classicism, these grand noble things, with reality, with what's really going on. It's important to consider that Wolfe was working in the context of really the very earliest budding of the neoclassical movement, which is what we're going to discuss in the next unit. His interest in merging the classical past with contemporary issues would really take hold in the coming decades, and indeed he was a teacher of many artists, many important artists that we're going to be looking at, especially American artists, who would carry his ideas forward.