An illustrator and painter of portraits, still lifes, landscapes, and genre scenes, Benjamin West Clinedinst owed his illustrious name to his father's admiration for the large painting Death on a Pale Horse (1802, Philadelphia Museum of Art) by Benjamin West. If his interest in art came from his father, Barnett, a would-be painter and practicing photographer, he also inherited a love of the military, for the elder Clinedinst had been a Confederate soldier. Consequently, he entered the Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, in 1876, after a grammar-school education in Staunton, Virginia. Clinedinst was more interested in a military career than one in the arts, but eyesight problems dashed his hopes for a life in the U.S. Army. By the end of his second year at the military school, however, he was also drawing from the antique under the Irish painter Hugh Newell at the Maryland Institute, Baltimore.
After graduating from the Virginia Military Institute, Clinedinst solicited advice on study abroad from Frederick Dielman, who, though he had been trained in Munich, recommended Paris. Leaving the United States in 1881, Clinedinst spent a year in Léon Bonnat's atelier before entering the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under Alexandre Cabanel. He stayed four years in Paris, summering at least once in Ecouen. One of his portraits was exhibited in the 1884 Salon, and another work, Peace, reportedly was bought by the French government.
In 1885 Clinedinst returned briefly to New York before settling in Baltimore with his parents. There he painted portraits, taught at the Charcoal Club, and began experimenting with genre pictures. He married Emily C. Waters in 1888 and moved to New York that year. Clinedinst secured a job teaching antique drawing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Gotham Art School. He first exhibited at the National Academy a year after arriving. He also began to gain a reputation as an illustrator of Colonial American scenes. In 1896 (the year he was temporarily removed from the National Academy of Design Associate roster for failing to exhibit in the annual exhibitions), Clinedinst and fellow artists Robert Blum, Charles Dana Gibson, Howard Pyle, and others founded the Society of American Illustrators. Four years later, he succeeded Pyle as director of illustration at the Drexel Institute, Philadelphia. The commute to Philadelphia was undoubtedly a hardship, and several years later he took a similar job in New York, at the Cooper Union, where he remained for some thirty years. The Academy, despite its punitive regulation to ensure members' participation in the annual exhibitions, did not hold a grudge in this case; Clinedinst was elected to the Council for the years 1898 to 1901.
The 1890s were filled with much illustration work for Scribner's and Century magazines, but Clinedinst also found time, then and in later years, to illustrate the books of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Mark Twain. Meanwhile, he kept up with his practice in portraiture, painting such celebrities as Twain, Admiral Perry, and Theodore Roosevelt. In 1905 Clinedinst moved his family to Pawling, where he lived until his death.
