Benjamin West: Incubator and Coordinator of a New American Renaissance Movement

Part 4 of a series

This essay examines an important battle nearly wiped memory that saw the emergence of a republican vanguard of artists and statesmen set the stage for a new renaissance in America. The contents featured below are an extract from the newly published first 228 page RTF Anthology “The Art of Liberty”. The previous installment can be read here.

In order to dive into an appreciation for the incredible figure of Benjamin West (friend of Ben Franklin, mentor of Samuel Morse, and leader of an American renaissance movement in England), let’s start this essay by reviewing an interesting painting from 1795 titled ‘The Royal Academicians’.

In the center is the president of the English Royal Academy of Fine Arts who trained Samuel F.B. Morse, and he is surrounded by different artists and artwork from the British Royal Academy.

That president and co-founder of the English Royal Academy is named Benjamin West.

Benjamin West was heralded, and for good reason, as the greatest living painter during his lifetime, and is a man of untold anomalies.

He was born in 1737—the same year as King George III, and was a Quaker, but that is not too anomalous. However, when we ask WHERE was this man born? Our story gets very interesting… since this President of the English Royal Academy of Fine Arts was born in Pennsylvania!

He’s a Quaker born in Pennsylvania, completely self-taught having received no formal training.

West actually learned how to paint because his family was very friendly with many Delaware natives. And they taught him to paint using clay and bear wax, bear grease from the lake nearby his house. And that’s how he learned how to paint.

Within a short time, this young man found himself in the same networks that were created by Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Philosophical Society.

West’s father was a very close friend of Ben Franklin and in 1751 or 1752, his father, who ran a boarding house, made his home the very first building in the world to put up a lightning rod.

When he was brought into England, I mean, there were patrons, friends of Ben Franklin who saw the man’s talents, his family and broader Quaker community did not want to let him paint because the Quakers, the strict Quakers, basically saw all forms of the arts as being corrupting because they awoke passions and passions were assumed to be equally dangerous for a fallen sinful mankind.

This is why they actually had to have an emergency meeting to address the question: “what do you do with this kid who has obvious talent and ambition?” And they had a long drawn-out meeting all night long where they finally came to the conclusion that “if God gave him this skill, and even though we agree that painting has tended to be something which doesn’t make you a better person, who’s to say it can’t make you a better person if done right?”

And they arrived at a pretty enlightened decision by saying “maybe he’s the one who can bring painting to another level where it can make people better.” Having received the seal of approval from his family and broader community, West found support from some of Ben Franklin’s friends who sponsored his voyage to Europe after seeing his painting The Last Days of Socrates [seen below], featuring the great philosopher taking the Hemlock, which was his first sort of big painting in America.

A young Benjamin West painting titled ‘The Last Days of Socrates’ produced while he was still in Philadelphia

It is admittedly a far cry from his later works, but it’s an interesting thing to choose to do as a teenager.

Franklin’s network sponsored his voyage to France in 1769 then to Italy, where he studied the great classics, the masters, and after two years of doing that, he was going to take a little bit of a sojourn to London before his planned return home. However, while in England, he caught the attention of some very interesting people, including one of the advisors of King George III himself. He must have made quite the impression because after this meeting, West quickly began to rise in influence within the English cultural scene, and he began to do some things that very few people appreciate to this very day.

This story has really been obscured from history books, and I sincerely believe that were it not for the incredible world of the Canadian-born historian Pierre Beaudry, who made this chapter possible through his pioneering studies, then Benjamin West’s story would still be hidden to this very day.

Here is a 1790s self-portrait of Benjamin West.

Benjamin West is a man of true classical Platonic tradition, and in order to get an insight into West’s character, we will have to explore the clues (that is to say, the anomalies and ironies) which he carefully embeds in his artwork.

In the mind of all Platonic renaissance artists, the language ironies, is a language of communication designed to invoke important ironies that challenge our preconceived assumptions about reality via anomalies that could awaken first a sense of perplexity, then wonder and finally, discoveries in the minds of an audience.

Now, admittedly not all of West’s art students followed this advice, but many of them- including Samuel F.B. Morse, did it masterfully.

For our first anomaly, let us review two paintings. The first is a self-portrait of a young West painted in 1770.

By this time, West had only recently arrived in England and received the patronage of King George III. He had also become a founding member of the English Royal Academy of Fine Arts that had just been set up in 1769, and in 1791, he actually became that organization’s president!

Now seven years later, in 1776 he does another painting of himself that looks remarkably similar. Do you see anything peculiar here:

It is noteworthy that this self-portrait is composed several weeks after King George III had received the Declaration of Independence and the war had officially really gotten underway.

Why would he do this?

What is the same and what is different between these two very similar paintings separated by seven years?

Does anything pop out?

What about his eyes? Is there a difference in them?

His eyes look darker in the later 1776 portrait.

But even more than simply being darker, or cast in shade, they also appear more worldly and wise when contrasted with the younger portrait where his eyes are lighter, more wide-eyed and more naive.

By the time 1776 rolls around, you know that he has seen a lot and learned to navigated corridors of power and intrigue of England’s royal courts.

I think there is also something significant in West’s pulling of his tight collar as well which occurs in both paintings.

He is after all, an American and these collars which were British formal attire were known to be pretty suffocating and it wasn’t customary to have these like tight, polite collars in America. I think his pulling on it is sort of a symbol of the tightness of the formalistic English culture.

Keep in mind, he never ends up returning to America as planned. He lives out his life in England, and never goes back to America. And he’s called a traitor for this by Americans who lived through the revolution.

He’s attacked as an American traitor, and ironically, he’s also attacked by the British for being an American spy. That latter accusation may be a bit more true.

Do you see any other anomalies in these two paintings?

The composition of the rag hanging over the canvas frame he is holding in his left hand has completely changed from one painting to the next.

On the second portrait, the rag looks very different from the first one which has nothing on it, whereas in the second one, there is definitely something there.

It isn’t easy to discern what that image is on the rag, and it took a really long time for me to figure it out, but it is human figure, and without the incredible studies of Pierre Beaudry, for whom I am eternally grateful, I may not have ever realized what this is.

This anomaly is a big one, and intentionally placed there to create the perplexity, the sense of irony that you are now feeling. So what is the discovery that West wants you to make? To answer that question, we need to look at another painting by West composed in 1770 titled ‘The Death of General Wolfe’ featuring a rendition of the 1759 death of the famous English general at the Battle of Quebec during the Seven Years War.

Does anybody recognize the two figures on the right?

Do those two figures and those two figures on the right side of the painting and those two figures on the rag look at all familiar? These are the figures featured on the rag in West’s self-portrait of 1776!

So that priest standing on the right, on the right side of this painting, next to the soldier in the red coat have some importance in West’s mind.

West appears to be saying something about this moment, this painting composed six years earlier, showcasing an event that happened twelve years earlier across the Atlantic Ocean. And the fact that he’s doing this in 1776 is not a coincidence either. Now, Benjamin West is most famous for his history paintings. He was a history painter and that’s what many of his students became as well.

He had a philosophy of history painting that society will value the memories that it has.

And the purpose of the painter is to convey those moments of his collective past and enshrine them in such a way. that universal lessons of who we are will be learned. This is a powerful philosophy that transcends the narrow limits of historical paintings which have been artificially imposed onto the field in our modern era which presumes historical paintings must be either objective, sterile renditions of the past, or emotionally manipulative propaganda and nothing more.

Okay, so what else do we have here?

What would have been important historically in this moment in 1759?

Well clearly, like I already mentioned, this is The Battle of Quebec at the Plains of Abraham.

The French had just lost, but as much as the French had just lost, General Wolfe, who was a young man, had also died at that battle.

This was a strategic moment because it was the decisive moment that the French empire lost its stranglehold in North America, giving the ability for Benjamin Franklin’s networks to organize for what would become the American revolution. These networks led by Franklin had already been planning out the conditions of declaring independence for decades, as the late historian Graham Lowry brilliantly demonstrated in his magnum opus ‘How the Nation was Won volume 1’ (1630-1757).

In order to create the conditions that would be ripe for the declaration of Independence, it was understood that Quebec, after it fell to the British, would likely side with the republican cause against the British Empire. The French Canadians themselves had almost unanimous consent that the British were tyrants. They didn’t like the British in general. They didn’t like the British Empire, but they got along very well with the other colonists of the thirteen colonies and it was understood that Quebec was going to be the 14th member of signing the Declaration of Independence.

That was pretty well understood, and that’s why Benjamin Franklin put so much of his work into going up to Quebec in 1776 to organize the elites and the people to be a part of it. That’s also why Franklin set up Canada’s first postal service in 1759 which ensured that lines of communication could be established across Quebec as a pre-condition for both organizing the revolution, but also elevating the culture of Canadians.

However, certain games were played and certain bribes were made, that ensured that that did not happen as we know, and history unfolded a different way.

But this was a very deciding moment, and it also features something that most British historians chose to ignore which revolved around a figure who was involved at that Battle of Quebec by the name of William Johnson. This man was featured in West’s painting, along with an array of other individuals, but in reality, no one was actually present, or even close to General Wolfe as he died.

You see, General Wolfe had gotten shot and he died behind a bush with like two other people in attendance. However Benjamin West chose to organize his composition in a very different way for a reason. This figure of William Johnson who is featured wearing native stockings, and moccasins is a very special person to both Benjamin West as well as to the entire battle of history. One thing that is noteworthy about Johnson is that he was an Irishman who moved to New York in 1738.

William Johnson featured with the priest

And he didn’t play by the typical British stuffy customs or rules of behavior.

He did things very differently, but very effectively when he started organizing treaties with the natives and working with the natives, with the Six Nations, the Mohawks and the Iroquois. He respected their customs and languages and built sincere relationships with many of these tribes that had been manipulated by the Jesuits for generations. Johnson is a figure who stands out, because while all of the other British soldiers and officers have this blanket tendency to treat the native populations as sub-human savages, this guy is integrated very much culturally with the native.

In the painting, West showcases him with the native stockings, moccasins. He’s renowned for being somebody who completely respected the native culture. He learned several different native dialects. And by 1742, he was made a Mohawk civil chief.

He was made the colonel of Six Nation Mohawks. The Mohawks even requested that he be the official representative of the British to them, because they couldn’t work with anybody else. Nobody else respected the natives and visa versa.

And you have him pointing to the soldier running towards the cluster in our vision, holding a fleur-de-lis and declaring victory. I think one of the things that’s also important that Benjamin West does here is he juxtaposes the strength of a Mohawk soldier, who were instrumental in this battle against the French.

In the same measure, in an earlier 1768 painting, West had chosen to convey Captain Williamson in a different context, saving the life of a defeated french soldier in 1758 from having his head scalped by a Mohawk warrior under his command. This demonstrated both the rare respect he earned from the fervently independent Mohawk warriors, and a sense of compassion for an enemy soldier who many Englishmen were encouraged at that time to look upon with disdain as enemies.

General Johnson Saving a Wounded French Officer

To restate: up until this point, the Jesuits which controlled the French territories of the Americas, had done the most work in organizing a lot of alliances with different native bands and had done an immense amount of damage manipulating these groups against each other, and sometimes against colonists. But the danger for the English republicans was that IF the Mohawks or Iroquois were going to be allied with someone during the war, then in all probability, it was going to be the Jesuit-run French. But largely through the efforts of William Johnson, the republican intelligentsia began to gain a creative hold over their French adversaries and also began to build a respectful relationship with native groups.

And when the Mohawks and Iroquois chose to fight alongside the English against the French, the scales of battle were tipped entirely.

So that was extremely important. The additional fact that you have this Native American warrior featured in the center of the image, almost carrying more weight than the dying General Wolfe, we are struck by a contrast between the weakness of the British Aristocratic Wolfe which may also symbolize, in a subtle way, the dying British Empire itself.

The Platonic ambiguity used by West is brilliant and intentional. If you’re an American republican or you’re a British aristocrat looking at this scene, you will get two very different messages.

And that was one of the brilliant things of great artists, is you can walk in the realm of ambiguity and communicate two different messages to two different people who may not understand what your actual intention is. To re-emphasize, Benjamin West painted his self portrait (signalling his earlier 1771 painting of The Death of General Wolfe) in 1776, and at this time, it was still unclear what the outcome of the war would be.

The other thing that made West’s treatment of the Battle special, and this is something that many people would take for granted today, is up until this 1771 painting, hardly a single history painting had been done using contemporary costumes. Especially in the “high cultures” of England and France, but really across all of Europe, every time that a history painting was done, it had to involve the costumes of Greco-Romans from 2,000 years earlier.

It’s weird to think about today, because it feels so obvious, and artists have been doing this for so long. But this was really a standard of behavior among the art community in the 18^th century.

And West was even threatened by the establishment. He was told, “you’re never going to get a commission again if you break from the rules”. But he did it. And he wrote to a friend saying that:

“The event intended to be commemorated took place on the 13th of September, 1759 in a region of the world unknown to the Greeks and Romans, and at a period of time when no such nations, nor heroes in their costume, any longer existed. The subject I have to represent is the conquest of a great province of America by the British troops. It is a topic that history will proudly record. And the same truth that guides the pen of the historian should govern the pencil of the artist. I consider myself as undertaking to tell this great event to the eye of the world; but if, instead of the facts of the transaction, I represent classical fictions, how shall I be understood by posterity?”

Through the power of his reason, talent and insight, West soon won over his audience. And when George III was asked to chime into the debate, he was actually so impressed with West’s line of reasoning and talent that purchased the painting, settling the debate for once and for all.

The meta-theme deployed by West and all leading early republican intelligentsia at this time revolved around the problem of resolving the discontinuities in European Americans with their civilizational proclivities and the First Nations with their unique civilization. How to harmonize them to create a society that could respect individualism of identity and diverse cultures while at the same time collaborating around a transcendental idea of a common freedom driven humanity?

And part of the understanding has always been that it will only be when American culture can understand and respect the Native cultures that, instead of just treating the Natives like they’re subhuman, clearing them from their land or sticking them into invisible prisons called ‘reservations’, but instead really treat them like sacred partners in a common mission… only at that point will America acquire the real moral fitness to survive. This is why James Fenimore Cooper focused so much on these themes in his popular tales later. This battle is expressed in another painting by Benjamin West, also completed in 1771 celebrating the famous Penn Treaty of 1682 in Pennsylvania.

Let us recall that West himself was from Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, and his grandfather was a close friend of William Penn (1644-1718). William Penn was the founder of Pennsylvania Colony, and was one of the key leaders of the Leibniz/Jonathan Swift’s networks in America. Penn had acquired a certain area of land, and he was committed not to just using it for wealth extraction the way the British Empire had expected, but rather developing the culture, economy and populations along the lines set forth by John Winthrop Jr and John Winthrop earlier.

The great historian Graham Lowry goes through a lot of William Penn’s work in his How the Nation Was Won.

Now Benjamin West’s painting featured the signing of a historic treaty between the Delaware natives and the English settlers in 1682. What needs to be understood, is that William Penn did not HAVE to sign this treaty. After all, he had been given sole dictatorial authority by the Crown Charter over the land of Pennsylvania.

He didn’t have to pay the Delaware natives anything if he didn’t want to. He could have used the “might makes right” principle of empire.

This nasty practice had been done many times before, and it was done many times afterwards… but he chose not to do it. Instead, he chose to work out an extremely important and unprecedented treaty, paying the Delaware people very much in a variety of ways and ensuring that they had total freedom to use the land as they saw fit, even after the Europeans began to settle down.

West’s painting features a moment where textiles and other gifts are being offered by Penn’s negotiators. Not alcohol or guns, but textiles, and other goods. We also see the famous cedar tree in the background, which is where the actual signing of the treaty took place. What is painted is not the signing but the respectful negotiations leading up to the signing.

There is a certain anomalous shadow cast upon the main figures in the center of the painting, and it is difficult to identify its source as it is not cast by a tree or building. It’s possible that it is being cast by clouds but it is possible that this element signifies the dangers ahead, as we know that the decades after 1682, Europeans and native relations were not always healthy. But despite the failings of the future, Penn’s treaty was renowned as one of the only treaties to have endured and was really honored for many, many generations.

The contents of the treaty itself are just so remarkable that I selected several articles that should be read in full here:

Article 1: That all William Penn’s people or Christians, and all the Indians should be brethren, as the children of one father, joined together as with one heart, one head, and one body.

Article 2: That all paths should be open and free to both Christians and Indians.

Article 3: That the Doors of the Christians’ houses should be open to the Indians, and the houses of the Indians open to the Christians, and that they should make each other welcome as their friends.

Article 4: That the Christians should not believe any false rumours or reports of the Indians, nor the Indians believe any such rumours or reports of the Christians, but should first come as brethren to inquire of each other; and that both Christians and Indians, when they have any such false reports of their brethren, they should bury them as in a bottomless pit.

These articles- especially number 4, are important because you always had intelligence operations, especially Jesuitical intelligence operations, manipulating tension between groups in the colonies. This involved conducting slanders, promoting gossip to various groups in order to induce and increase hostilities between the white men and the natives, or actually manipulating, in a very racist way, certain native groups from Canada, from Quebec, that they would then deploy and conduct massacres using very, very high level sort of MK Ultra brainwashing operations as those outlined by Cynthia Chung in her recent book ‘The Shaping of a World Religion: From Jesuits, Freemasons and Anthropologists to the Ghost Dance Religion’.

It was a very nasty operation. And it has been written about over the years how these things were done. Frederick Schiller also writes about this his 1792 study ‘The Jesuit Government in Paraguay’.[1]

And the fact that this concept was so clearly embedded in William Penn’s treaty is very interesting. All participants agreed to say: “OK, before we react emotionally over some gossip or provocation, which gets us into trouble by unjustly seeking revenge, let’s talk with each other and see if a certain slander is true or false first before reacting.” And that makes all the difference.

Article five, “That if the Christians heard any ill news that may be to hurt of the Indians or the Indians any such ill news that may be to injury of the Christians, they should acquaint each other with it speedily as true friends and brethren”.

Article six, “That the Indians should do no matter of harm to the Christians nor to their creatures, nor the Christians any harm to the Indians, but each treat the other as brethren first. But as there are wicked people in all nations, if either Indians or Christians should do any harm to each other, complaint should be made of it by the person suffering and the right might be done. And when satisfaction is made, the injury or wrong should be forgot and buried as in a bottomless pit.”

Article eight: “That the Indians should in all things assist the Christians and the Christians assist the Indians against all wicked people that would disturb them.”

And lastly, article Nine: “That both Christians and Indians should acquaint their children with this league and firm chain of friendship made between them. And that it should always be made stronger and stronger and be kept bright and clean without rust or spot between our children and children’s children while the creeks and rivers run and while the sun and moon and stars endure.”

The mode of thinking expressed by this treaty is very emblematic of the Peace of Westphalia, of the Principle of the Benefit of the Other that had only been recently created in 1648-- just 40 years before Penn’s Treaty, as the basis of international relations, the creation of the modern sovereign nation state, premised on the Christian concept that the respect of your neighbor was linked to your own self-interest. With the Westphalia Peace Treaty that ended the Thirty Year War bloodbath that reduced Europe to ashes, a new Christian concept was enshrined into international law that asserted that each nations’ self-interest would now wholly be premised upon the benefit of their neighbor’s welfare and the forgiveness of past transgressions.

Now let’s shift gears just a little bit. And address another problem resolved elegantly by Benjamin West, which is: How do you convey virtue in a painting?

That’s not so easy. You can convey many things in a painting. You can convey emotions. You can convey photo realistic impressions of objects. You can even convey propaganda through the manipulation of emotions.

But how do you convey the type of universal sentiments and universal characteristics that we really should cherish and value in a real democracy?

We will explore this question in our final installment of this series by reviewing some explosive paintings by Benjamin West that express the highest poetic and philosophical ideals on earth while simultaneously intervening into Universal History.

Endnote

[1] Later on, Samuel B Morse even exposes this Jesuitical operation in the America’s in his famous book ‘Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States’ published in 1841 where he described Prince Metternich’s Holy Alliance and it’s deployment of Jesuits throughout the Americas to undo the American revolution when he said “the latter come from the same quarter, in the shape of hundreds of Jesuits and priests; a class of men notorious for their intrigue and political arts, and who have a complete military organization through the United States.”

For more work on Classical painting and the fight for republican principles across the ages, pick up a copy of ‘The Art of Liberty’ which I just released with Cynthia Chung in time for Christmas

I am the editor-in-chief of The Canadian Patriot Review, Senior Fellow of the American University in Moscow and Director of the Rising Tide Foundation. I have written the four volume Untold History of Canada series, four volume Clash of the Two Americas series, the Revenge of the Mystery Cult Trilogy and Science Unshackled: Restoring Causality to a World in Chaos. I am also co-host of the weekly Breaking History on Badlands Media where this article was first posted and host of Pluralia Dialogos (which airs every second Sunday at 11am ET here).