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Benjamin West's Professional Endgame and the Historical Conundrum of William Williams
Susan Rather
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IN the early 1780s, Thomas Eagles, an English gentleman living in Bristol, was approached by a stranger who requested his help in gaining admission to a hospital for indigents. Eagles perceived the supplicant to be no common beggar and asked him to call at his residence. Other visits and financial assistance followed, as Eagles developed a protective interest in the intelligent old man, who gave his name as William Williams.1 Williams said he had been both a painter and a mariner and, in due course, Eagles found him a place in the Merchants' and Sailors' Almshouse of Bristol. Their friendship continued until Williams's death in 1791, but despite the length of the association, Eagles never learned very much about the enigmatic Williams. He was thus completely unprepared for the grateful artist's bequest, an astonishing collection of personal effects, including a self-portrait, some two hundred books, and a manuscript "Lives of the Artists." Only then, it seems, did Eagles read another manuscript that Williams had entrusted to him some years earlier: a remarkable first-person narrative by a pseudonymous "Mr. Penrose," a shipwrecked sailor who spends nearly three decades among Central American Indians.2 This novel, probably based on experiences of his own life, is surely Williams's most startling legacy.3 But Eagles had further occasion for surprise. In 1805, Benjamin West, the president of the Royal Academy of Art and "Historical Painter to the King," was shown the manuscript of the castaway adventure and recognized stories once related to him. More than a half century earlier in America, Williams had been West's first instructor. "Had it not been for him," West declared, "I should never have been a painter."4 |
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West had risen quickly to the top of his profession after moving to London in 1763, but by 1805, his reputation was in steep decline; perhaps for the first time in many years, he thought wistfully about returning to America. His encounter with the Penrose manuscript prompted a flood of memories, and Eagles wanted to hear them. "Perhaps he was the only person in existence who cd. give any acct. of Wms' life & manners," Eagles noted in his memorandum of West's remarks on that occasion. In 1810, West provided Eagles (who hoped to publish the Robinson Crusoe-like tale) with a detailed account of Williams, which necessarily also reflected on West's own New World story.5 Thus West began the systematic reconsideration of his beginnings as a painter, a process that culminated, in 1816, with a biography of his first twenty-five years.6 That work, which he closely controlled, decisively shaped West's image for posterity. |
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