Benjamin West, Artistic Precedent, & Historical Accuracy

A contemporary biography of West, and John Thomas Flexner in America's Old Masters, p. 66, asserts that West broke new ground by defying tradition and painting a historical scene with historical figures in contemporary dress. Charles Mitchell, in "Benjamin West's "Death of General Wolfe" and the Popular History Piece," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Volume 7, 1944, pp. 10-33, argues otherwise. Mitchell indicates that there were a number of precedents, including paintings of the death of Wolfe (see painting by Edward Penny). Mitchell also documents West's historical innacuracies (citing an article by J. C. Webster in the Journal of the Society of Army Historical Research, VI, 1927, p. 30 ff.). What West did, according to Mitchell, was to create "a pictorial formula which both expressed the national self-consciousness of Englishmen and perpetuated the Christian and pagan traditions of ideal virtue." This was reinforced and was itself reinforcing by the wide distribution of the painting as an engraving which by itself made the engravers (by 1790), rich men.