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

Scott Paul Gordon

In October 1767 a patron discouraged Charles Willson Peale from pursuing "History painting," which is "the 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 practice had fired Peale's enthusiasm for history painting. Carroll's claim that the eighteenth-century British colonies in America 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 themselves or people they knew only intensifies the oddity of West's The Death of Socrates, a history painting that has been called "the most ambitious and interesting picture produced in colonial America" (Figure I). How, as James Thomas Flexner asked in 1952, can we explain the "creation of such a canvas by an eighteen-year-old boy" in "the backwoods metropolis of Lancaster"?1 The answer may lie in the cultural politics of Lancaster, a community vulnerable to Indian attacks that, by late 1755, many considered inevitable.	1
Figure I Benjamin West, The Death of Socrates, 1756, oil on canvas, 34 × 41 inches. Courtesy, Historical Society of Pennsylvania Collection, Atwater Kent Museum of Philadelphia. A color version is available on http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/wm/65.1/gordon.html.
West himself encouraged listeners to believe that the painting emerged out of his own youthful imagination. Toward the end of his life, as Susan Rather has demonstrated, West collaborated with his biographer, John Galt, to create the myth of a youth "instructed by nature" and "acquir[ing] art artlessly." West's account of the origins of The Death of Socrates participates in this mythmaking. As Galt recounts the story, William Henry, a Lancaster gunsmith with whom West lodged, "read to him" about the death of Socrates from "the English translation of Plutarch." The "affecting story ... wrought upon the imagination of West, and induced him to make a drawing," which Henry saw and "requested" that West "paint it." When West needed a model for "the slave who presented the poison," Henry sent for one of his workmen. "The appearance of the young man, whose arms and breast were naked, instantaneously convinced the Artist that he had only to look into nature for the models which would impart grace and energy to his delineation of forms." Galt was not the first person West impressed with this tale that links The Death of Socrates to his discovery that an artist need only to look into nature. In 1807 a young American, Nicholas Biddle, recorded in his diary a conversation with West that closely anticipates Galt's story. West told Biddle that Henry "suggested to West the death of Socrates which they were reading together. Henry made one of his workmen stand up that West might design his fine nervous arm, & it was from this that W took the disposition to copy nature."2	. . .