Martial Art: Benjamin West's "The Death of Socrates," Colonial Politics, and the Puzzles of Patronage

Abstract

IN October 1767 a patron discouraged Charles Willson Peale from pursuing History painting, which is most Difficult Part of the Profession and Requires the utmost Genius in the artist [;] few arrive at a High Point of Perfection in it, Charles Carroll wrote. And indeed in this Part of the world few have a Taste for it and very few can go thro' the Expence of giving that Encouragement that such an artist would Desire. Peale received Carroll's dispiriting letter, which pointedly failed to reassure him that he was one of those few painters with genius, while he was a student in the London studio of Benjamin West, whose prac tice had fired Peale's enthusiasm for history painting. Carroll's claim that the eighteenth-century British colonies in offered unreceptive cultural soil for history painting has been confirmed by work in early American art history. That colonial Americans who commissioned or purchased paintings were interested almost entirely in portraits of them selves or people they knew only intensifies the oddity of West's The Death of Socrates, a history painting that has been called most ambi tious and interesting picture produced in colonial America (Figure I). How, as James Thomas Flexner asked in 1952, can we explain the cre ation of such a canvas by an eighteen-year-old boy in backwoods metropolis of Lancaster?1 The answer may lie in the cultural politics of