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CAREER OF BENJAMIN WEST
Benjamin West. — His Biographer, John Galt. — Ancestry and Childhood. — Early Patrons and Instruction. — Leaves Philadelphia for New York and sails thence
for Italy. — Study and Work in Italy. — Arrival in London and Success there. — His Marriage. — Introduction to the King and Rise in Royal Favor. — "Death of General Wolfe." — Founding of the Royal Academy. — Loss of Royal Patronage on the Failure of the King's Mind.— "Christ healing the Sick," and Other Late Works. — His Death. — West's Career. — Fortunate throughout his Life. — His Training. — His Public.— Quality of his Work. —His Personal Character
The
life of Copley was long, honorable, and successful, but it was not picturesque. It was his surroundings when a boy
that turned him to art, and he followed painting, without enthusiasm, as the most obvious means of earning a
livelihood. With his industry and intelligence, his success would have been equally assured if chance had directed
his talents into law or trade. With West it was different. His career has long been used as a triumphant
demonstration of the theory of God-given genius, which, like lightning, strikes where it will, and develops in
spite of the most uncongenial surroundings. The story of his childish attempts at drawing has been worked into a
sort of tradition, and is known to thousands who never saw one of his pictures, nor ever heard the name of Copley.
The story is a remarkable one, but it has been aided greatly in popularity by the telling. John Gait was, as one
may say, the official biographer. He was a writer of ability, who tried his hand at everything,—poems, plays,
essays, novels,—a precursor of the " Kail Yard " school, whose Scotch dialect stories have had sufficient vitality
to warrant their reprinting within the last few years. But between his romances and his plays, he was a man who, as
he himself says of Plutarch, "had no taste for the blemishes of mankind. His mind delighted in the contemplation of
moral vigor; and he seems justly to have thought that it was nearly allied to virtue; hence many of those
characters whose portraiture in his works furnish the
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