The painter was the youngest among ten children of John West, a cooper who had emigrated from England as an adult and im­proved his status by becoming an innkeeper in America. After con­ducting a tavern in the river city of Chester, Pennsylvania, he had moved in 1737 to Springfield Township, a prosperous farming area some six miles north of Chester and ten west of Philadelphia. He had rented one of the finest houses in the region, a three-story stone mansion on the highroad, where he opened an inn to serve the German immigrants who were streaming from the banks of the Delaware into the back country.

John West's neighbours were Quakers, descendants of the re­ligious rebels who had fled England with William Penn only sixty years before; many of the original settlers still preached salvation in the new stone meeting house. It was a sober hard-working com­munity; the men laboured all week in their fields and the women by their firesides, but on "First Day," as the Sabbath was called to avoid a word that smacked of sun-worship, not a hand touched plough or spindle; everyone hurried to meeting. Although they wore their best clothes, there was not a hint of finery; black coats and round black hats gave the men an air of perpetual mourning, while the women hid their hair and shadowed their faces under disfiguring grey bonnets. Like a flock of earth-bound ravens, the farmers streamed to worship under trees bright with summer bloom.

However, every breast, despite its sombre seeming,, seethed with the unslaked fire of a passionate worship of God. The farmers escaped from the monotony of field and forest into visions of Hell and Heaven, into the flattering war waged between God and Satan for their individual souls. The visit of an itinerant evangelist who brought a new message from the battlefront was the most exciting event possible in their restricted lives; they flocked to revival meet­ings as their descendants might to a barn dance or a country fair.

Benjamin West told his biographer that when his mother was far advanced in her pregnancy, an English Quaker evangelist, a doughty wrestler with evil, appeared in Chester County; although the baby already moved in her womb, Mrs. West could not bear to stay at home. The preacher, she later told her son, was in fine form that autumn afternoon. He cried out against the wickedness of the Old World, from which so many of his listeners had recently emigrated. He held up to abhorrence the licentious manners and atheistical principles of the French, and in fluent words depicted England worshipping the golden calf of commerce; God would visit Europe with fire and brimstone, he promised. Then he begged his hearers to turn their eyes to America, where "the forests shall be seen fading away, cities rising along the shores, and the terrified nations of Europe flying out of the smoke of the burning to find refuge here." Mrs. West was so moved by this vision of greatness descending on her forest clearing that she was seized by labour pains. The meeting broke up; the ladies made a circle around her and finally carried her home, where the premature pains, obviously brought on by excitement, soon subsided.

Although Benjamin was not born for another thirteen days (October 10, 1738), his father, so the story goes, was deeply im­pressed by his wife's seizure in the meeting house. Even reputable scientists then believed in prenatal influence, and every Quaker knew that the Lord often manifested Himself by signs to the most humble. Did it not all mean that God had selected little Benja­min for some divine mission? Eagerly John West sought out the preacher and confided his hopes. The delighted evangelist took him by the hand, "and with emphatic solemnity said that a child sent into the world under such remarkable circumstances would prove no ordinary man." Mr. West hurried home and studied the wizened infant in his cradle, watching for another sign to show what destiny awaited the lad. And when in the taproom of his inn he repeated the prophecy to the Friends there assembled, they listened with excitement and carried home to their families awed accounts of how God's Grace had descended on their forest settle­ment.

This story, which West told when over eighty, is thrown into great doubt by the fact that Edmund Peckover, the evangelist West named, did not reach America until several years after the painter was born. However, incidents which happened to the insignificant are with the passage of time often attributed to the famous; it may be that the reputation of the Friend who preached that day had been forgotten and that therefore West had gradually convinced himself that the preacher involved was the internationally famous Peckover. In its other details, the account is very plausible; no good romancer, making it.up from whole cloth, would have allowed the birth to wait for thirteen days after the meeting. And the aura of sanctity with which such a happening would have surrounded West