WEST, Benjamin

The subject of this painting was taken from Roman history. Agrippina the Elder was a distinguished and prominent Roman woman of the first century AD. She was the wife of the general and statesman Germanicus and was granddaughter of Augustus, Rome’s first emperor,.

The scene shows the widowed Agrippina returning to Rome carrying the ashes of her assassinated husband, Germanicus. She is accompanied by her two young children, Caligula, the future emperor, and Agrippina the Younger, who was to be the mother of the Emperor Nero. Agrippina has placed herself and her children in certain danger by returning to confront the Emperor Tiberius, who was widely believed to have instigated Germanicus’s murder. Germanicus’s popularity as a general, as well as his wife’s legendary virtue, draws large crowds of sympathizers to greet her when she disembarks at Brundisium.

Painted for the Archbishop of York, this canvas led to King George III’s lifelong patronage of West, despite the Pennsylvania-born artist’s frank American patriotism.

This well-preserved panel is among West’s finest mythological pictures, of which he painted no less than 48 eight throughout his career. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1798, but West subsequently revised it on two later occasions in 1803 and 1808, a practice he regularly engaged in after 1800.

The American artist, Benjamin West, arrived in England in 1763, after spending three years in Italy. He quickly gained the patronage of George III, for whom he became Historical Painter in 1772 carrying out a number of projects, especially at Windsor Castle, involving classical, historical and religious subjects. West was a founding member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768 and succeeded Sir Joshua Reynolds as President in 1792.

A series of eight paintings illustrating events from the reign of Edward III was commissioned from West by George III to decorate the Audience Chamber at Windsor Castle. The task took three years to complete from 1786 to 1789, but the arrangement was dismantled by George IV during the mid-1820s when much of Windsor Castle was redesigned by Jeffry Wyatville. However, a view of the Audience Chamber with the pictures still in place is included in W. H. Pyne’s The History of the Royal Residences of 1819. The present painting was double-hung on the left of the throne balancing The Burghers of Calais on the right, positioned above the door.

The series illustrates Edward III’s campaign in northern France during the summer of 1346. Edward III crossing the Somme is the first in the sequence and shows an incident preceding the Battle of Cr�cy, when the king was trying to cross the River Somme at Blanche Tache, near Abbeville, in order to escape the French army. Edward III encountered and engaged a part of the French force under Godemar de Faye, the outcome of which, like the Battle of Cr�cy itself, was dependent upon the skill of the English archers seen in the upper right of the composition. The king is on horseback just to the right of centre and the figures accompanying him can be identified with the aid of a key provided by the artist for George III. An oil sketch of the composition is in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California.

A subject taken from medieval history was an unusual choice for this date. According to West’s earliest biographer, John Galt, it was George III who, ‘recollecting that Windsor Castle had, in its present form, been created by Edward the Third, said, that he thought the achievements of his splendid reign were well calculated for pictures, and would prove very suitable ornaments to the halls and chambers of that venerable edifice.’ In addition to his military prowess, Edward III had also been the founder of the Order of the Garter that is so closely associated with Windsor Castle. The paintings by West must be seen, therefore, as part of a revival of interest in the Middle Ages that was being pioneered by antiquarians such as Joseph Struttz and Francis Grose, to whose works the artist clearly referred for details of the arms, armour, and dress. For the historical narrative the primary sources in English were an early translation of the Chronicles (1325-1400) of Jean Froissart and the History of England (1754-62) by David Hume. West’s work showed that ideal truth could be sought in themes unrelated to antiquity, and his lively treatment of such subject matter reveals his innovative qualities as an artist.

Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820) was a naturalist and patron of science. From an early age, his declared passion was natural history, and in particular, botany. He joined Captain Cook’s 1768 expedition on the Endeavour to Tahiti for astronomical observations (to observe the transit of Venus).

In West’s portrait he wears a Maori cloak and stands beside other trophies from New Zealand and Polynesia, as if in rebuke of his more conventional contemporaries who were portrayed in Rome with their purchases of classical antiquities.

The painting depicts Musidora and her two companions, Sacharissa and Amoret, at their bath espied by Damon. It illustrates a passage from James Thompson’s The Seasons (“Summer”) published between 1726 and 1730.

The canvas was painted in 1795, but was retouched by the painter in 1806.

In London, he succeeded in uniting the great tradition of 18th century English portraiture with a reawakened interest in history painting. His particular appeal in the eyes of an English public lay in the fact that he did not use the historical situation to magnify the dignity of the sitter to the point of heroism, and did not stylise the figure of the colonel into a monumental bearer of history.

Colonel Johnson is shown in a relaxed pose, with an Indian cloak draped over his uniform and moccasins on his feet. Behind him, in the half shadow, stands an Indian chief who is smiling down on the seated man and pointing out, with a gesture of his left hand, the peaceful existence of his tribe, visible in the background. The fresh, clear face of the colonel, the Indian attributes and the chief himself all suggest a love of liberty without violence, and a sense of honest and egalitarian cooperation.

George, later George IV, and Frederick, later Duke of York, were the sons of King George III of England. The painting, intended as a gift for Catherine the Great of Russia, was commissioned from West by George III and his wife, Sophia-Charlotte.

This painting is one of a group of portraits of members of the Royal Family painted by West between 1777 and 1784. It portrays Prince William (1776-1834), later 2nd Duke of Gloucester and Edinburgh, and his elder Sister, Princess Sophia (1773-1844) of Gloucester. They were the eldest children of William Duke of Gloucester, brother of King George III.

The painting was commissioned by West’s royal patron George III as a token of his reconciliation with his brother and their family.

West began his career as a portrait painter in Philadelphia and New York. Patrons enabled him to visit Rome by granting him a scholarship, the first American artist to be helped in this way.

The painting represents the Battle of La Hogue, a crucial naval skirmish of the War of the Grand Alliance in which English and Dutch fleets successfully defeated a large French invasion in May of 1692.

The painting is signed and dated on the stern of Admiral Rooke’s boat: B. West 1778. Retouched 1806. The preliminary work was started by West as early as 1778, then West had given his student John Trumbull, a fellow American who had re-entered his studio in January 1784 the task of completing most of the work. Finally, the painting was finished by West himself in 1806.

George III commissioned Benjamin West to paint a series of large compositions (1786-89) of Edward III’s victories over the French in the Hundred Years War for the Audience Chamber at Windsor Castle. This painting is one of them.

The painting represents an episode of the conquest of Quebec in 1759.

The genre in which English painters were least happy in the second half of the 18th century was history painting; the efforts of Reynolds in this direction are strangely petrified for so living a painter. Yet it was through history painting that Neo-Classicism invaded the art in England. A Scot, Gavin Hamilton (1738-1820) and an American, Benjamin West, who enjoyed a prodigious success, were in advance of the French painter Jacques-Louis David in the conception of a painting as a scene from Classical history, based upon thorough archeological research.

West was most successful when least pretentious; his illustrations of English historical events are simply illustrations, simply composed, uneffectedly direct. Neo-classicism had trained West to give value to the facts of the scene depicted, removing anything merely decorative or liable to spoil the sense of witnessing an actual event.

This painting relates, with differences, to West’s composition for a window commissioned by George III for St. George’s Chapel, Windsor which was installed in 1796. The window has since been removed, but the composition is known from old descriptions and the existence of an oil sketch. The present work was probably painted as a modified replica or a preliminary study.