Best from the Least

To jaded Rome's courtiers, cardinals and contesse, young Benjamin West seemed the essence of Jean Jacques Rousseau's "natural man." The handsome innkeeper's son had come in 1760 from the wilds of Pennsylvania to study painting, and he charmed with tales of how he had learned to mix pigments from the Indians, how he had made brushes from the hair of the family cat. Shown the Apollo Belvedere, he exclaimed, to their delight: "My God, how like a Mohawk warrior!"

Alas, the style that West developed in Rome and later brought to England was anything but natural. He experimented with pompous neoclassicism, then bombastic religious allegory. He pioneered in introducing elements of realism into his heavy historical tableaux, won riches and renown, was elected president of the Royal Academy. But to Byron, he was

. . . the dotard West,

Europe's worst daub, poor England's best.

History has tended to side with Byron. Nonetheless, buried beneath West's studied claptrap lurks considerable native talent. This gift shines forth in an exhibit of 36 rarely seen drawings, many of them owned until recently by descendants of the painter in England, now at Manhattan's Bernard Black Gallery. Since the drawings are mostly landscapes or sketches for larger compositions, the gallery placed them, wherever possible, next to a photocopy of the finished work. The demonstration is plain: as West's ideas progressed from initial draft to finished sketch to final oil, faces froze, bodies puffed out. The muscular athlete in the initial sketch becomes, on canvas, a wooden Greek soldier. In almost every case, West was at his best when he stuck to his least.

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