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Ad Code: 3
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An example of work by William Edward West
Artwork images are copyright of the artist or assignee
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Biography from Charleston Renaissance Gallery:
| Born in Lexington, Kentucky, West began painting miniature portraits as a teenager. Among his few extant early works is a portrait of Dr. Samuel Brown (c. 1807; University of Kentucky Art Museum, Lexington), a prominent local physician and patron. Brown helped the artist travel to Philadelphia, where he sought instruction in Thomas Sully’s studio around 1808. West befriended Sully, and remained partially based in Philadelphia, while pursuing his early career as an itinerant portraitist for the next decade, making trips to the South for commissions in Lexington and along the Mississippi River to Natchez and New Orleans, where he was living in 1817.
A portrait of Thomas Hinds, with its simple, torso-length rendering of form, is characteristic of many of West’s portraits of this period—the rich coloring and details, flushed skin tones, and softly-painted atmospheric background—all revealing the influence of Sully’s style and technique. It was painted before West sailed for Europe late in 1819, briefly traveling and studying art in France and Switzerland. In 1820 he arrived in Florence, where he began a period of formal training at the Academy.
He remained in Europe for the next two decades, securing his celebrity as an American artist abroad in 1822 by painting the last known life portrait of Lord Byron in Leghorn, Italy, as well as Byron's mistress, the Countess Guiccioli, who was with Byron at that time. West spent time in Paris in 1824, before settling in London in 1825. He was known widely in his European and American cultural circles for his sociable personality and gifts as a raconteur, as well as for his skills as an artist. One close London friend and patron, the poet Felicia Hemans, wrote teasingly that, having not seen him for a long time, she imagined that he had returned “to dine on the banks of the Mississippi.” (Pennington 1985, p. 26)
West remained in London until financial reversals forced him to return to the United States in 1838. He continued his career in New York and Baltimore, and retired to the home of close relatives in Nashville two years before his death. RS
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