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Biography of Benjamin West
Name: Benjamin West
Birth Date: October 10, 1738
Death Date: March 11, 1820
Place of Birth: Springfield Township, Pennsylvania, United States
Nationality: American
Gender: Male
Occupations: artist
Benjamin West
Benjamin West (1738-1820), the first of America's emigré artists, became one of Europe's most important neoclassic painters.Benjamin West was born on Oct. 10, 1738, in Springfield Township, Pa., to a struggling innkeeper who had emigrated from England. Though the Wests lived among Quakers, who habitually frowned upon art, Benjamin seems to have been encouraged by all about him from the time he began to draw at the age of six years. He gained a reputation in eastern Pennsylvania as a child prodigy. At first he was self-taught, but later, before his departure for Italy in 1759, he knew the paintings of William Williams and Gustavus Hessalius, whose work he soon surpassed.Among West's American works produced during the 1750s were the Death of Socrates, forecasting his later neoclassic work; a somewhat fantastic Landscape with Cow (1748), revealing his early dreams of storybook castles; and a lustrous portrait of the young Thomas Mifflin. While …showed first 150 words…
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…showed last 150 words…here vast and unmeasurable; and color, rather than being applied to neat outlines, was handled in a free, Rubenesque manner.West died in London on March 11, 1820. He played a fundamental role in the history of American art by encouraging and training the most gifted younger American painters of his time. In spite of his position, he was friendly and helpful to any artist, American or English, who stopped at his studio. Further Reading John Galt, The Life and Studies of Benjamin West (2 vols., 1816-1820), is an amusingly anecdotal biography by a contemporary Scottish novelist and the source for later studies. Also useful is Henry E. Jackson, Benjamin West: His Life and Work (1900). Grose Evans, Benjamin West and the Taste of His Times (1959), groups West's work into the stately, pathetic, and dread modes.Alberts, Robert C., Benjamin West: a biography, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978.Flexner, James Thomas, America's old masters, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982, 1980.
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