It is a singular history, that of the boy from Chester County, whom Byron called--
The dotard West, Europe's worst daub, and poor England's best.
The Archbishop of York, for whom he had painted his "Agrippina landing with the Ashes of Germanicus," presented the young American to George III. "The Departure of Regulus from Rome" won for him the royal favor. In 1768 he was one of the founders of the Royal Academy, and in 1792 he succeeded Sir Joshua Reynolds as President of that institution.
The _Port Folio_ is full of accounts of "Christ Healing the Sick," West's generous gift to the Pennsylvania Hospital, and of his "Death on the Pale Horse," and his "Paul and Barnabas" in the Pennsylvania Academy.
In a letter from West to Charles Willson Peale, dated November 3, 1809, and published in the _Port Folio_ of the following year, reference is made to a young gentleman, studying under his directions, "whose talents only want time to mature them to excellence," and West desires his friends in Philadelphia to procure for the young man the means of studying another year. That rising artist, who had early felt the generous assistance of Benjamin West, was Thomas Sully, who had the honor, in 1837-8, of painting the scene of Queen Victoria's coronation, and his daughter, to save her Majesty fatigue, stood for her, wearing the royal robes.
John Trumbull, son of "Brother Jonathan" the patriot, who painted the famous "Declaration of Independence," was imprisoned for treason in London, and was only released by Benjamin West, to whom he had been introduced by Franklin, becoming his surety. Gilbert Stuart, greatest of American portrait painters, who has graven the face of Washington upon our memories, learned his art and received his earliest encouragement in the English home of Benjamin West. It is a matter of interesting and singular memory that a Boston boy, John Singleton Copley, sent anonymously to West, in 1760, a portrait which at once attracted attention. It was "The Boy and the Flying Squirrel," the boy representing Copley's half-brother, Henry Pelham. Through West's influence the picture was exhibited at Somerset House. Through West again, Copley was elected a fellow of the Society of Artists of Great Britain. When he crossed the ocean to make his home near West, he took with him his Boston-born son, John Singleton, Jr., who became in 1827, the year that the _Port Folio_ suspended, Lord Chancellor of England, and was raised to the peerage as Baron Lyndhurst. To Lyndhurst, as the greatest of orators, Lord Lytton dedicated his _St. Stephen's_.