This beautifully and thoroughly illustrated book, which constitutes the first serious investigation of the relationship between the artists Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley, will be of considerable interest to both British and American historians, and appeal to art lovers from both countries.
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 where he started to paint modern historical subjects in emulation of the model provided him by West, following, for example, West’s celebrated Death of General Wolfe. 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.
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