Benjamin West

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TitleBenjamin West

Artist Samuel F.B. Morse (American, 1791 - 1872)

Original artistAfter Sir Thomas Lawrence (British, 1769 - 1830)

Dateca. 1811

MediumOil on canvas

DimensionsUnframed: 30 1/4 × 25 3/8 in. Framed: 36 7/8 × 31 7/8 × 4 1/4 in.

Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY, Purchase, 1944

Object number893-P

Label TextThe circumstances under which Morse's portrait of Benjamin West was painted are not known. It is a copy of the head from the full length, seated portrait of West painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence in 1811 (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut). Lawrence's portrait of West remained in West's possession, and thus could have been available to Morse when he was studying in London from mid-1811 into 1815. As a "fresh" portrait by one English master of the Anglo-American president of the Royal Academy, it would have been an enticing subject for an aspiring student. During his later years West did not care to spare time for sittings and responded to requests for portraits by asking that copies should be taken from the Lawrence portrait, instead. Such was his response to Bostonian, Henry Pickering, for whom Charles Robert Leslie made a half-length copy in about 1818, well after Morse's return to America. Pickering gave his copy of the Lawrence by Leslie to the Boston Athenaeum in 1824. In 1923, Edward Morse, the artist's son, wrote Mr. C. K. Johnson, then the owner of this painting, that he remembered it well, as hanging in Morse's library in the family's New York home on Twenty-second Street; he was quite sure it was the center of the three pictures shown hanging in that room in the illustration of the room in Prime's Life of Samuel F. B. Morse.

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