New book investigates the relationship between Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley
Allen Staley, Copley and West in England 17751815 | May 2021 | 176 pp | HB. 290 x 240 mm | 93 illus. | 9781916237803 Published by The Burlington Press. Distributed by Paul Holberton Publishing.
LONDON
.- This beautifully illustrated book is the first in-depth investigation of the relationship between two of the greatest 18th-century American artists, Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley.
West and Copley have always and properly been viewed as the two greatest eighteenth-century American artists, despite the fact that, at the age of twenty-one, West left his native shores in 1760, never to return. He went on to become immensely successful in England, becoming, among other things, the second president of the Royal Academy of Arts. Copley spent half his working life also in England. However, before making the move across the Atlantic, he made his mark as an exceptionally talented artist, who, without any real training, painted likenesses of fellow Bostonians, including ones of figures such as John Hancock and Paul Revere, that have become icons of American history. While those portraits remain his most widely admired works, after 1775 and his resettling in England, he started painting distinctly different types of pictures, initially showing modern historical subjects in emulation of the model provided him by West, following, for example, Wests celebrated Death of General Wolfe, exhibited in 1771, with his own Death of the Earl of Chatham, begun in 1779. For a brief span of time, the two expatriate Americans had a close working relationship, that we can see substantially reflected in both the formal language and the subject matter of many of their best works, but it eventually and inevitably turned into rivalry.