Forty years before the scandal that threatens to consume him, Benjamin West is on a riverbank in Pennsylvania covered in mud. He will never forget the smell of it, the feel of it. Rocks and minerals pulverised by time, swirled into sludge by the same forces that will eventually grind everything down.
Benjamin and his elder brother William are following a Mohawk tribesman. The tribesman, Running Wolf, has promised to impart to them secret knowledge that Benjamin wants, and his brother thinks he is mad to want.
As Benjamin West makes his way along a steep bank he slips. A world flies up around him; his elbow, then the rest of his body, hits the ground, and seconds later he is looking at the sky.
‘Tarnation!’ he bellows.
The mud is spattered across his stockings and breeches, and he can feel it starting to seep under his jacket. He slides towards the water. He grabs at a root, winces at the raw pain of it against his hand. Below the river roars and shimmers. With a jolt his body stops.
‘Benjamin!’
His brother’s face – upside down – hovers above him. He can see the raw lines of shock upon it. His eyes are darting back and forth, making the calculation: can he descend the bank without slipping himself and dragging them both towards the river?
Benjamin looks downwards. He can see a rock jutting out, and lunges towards it with his right foot. Once he has confirmed the rock will take his weight, he swings his whole body round so he is facing the bank, and starts to attempt the climb back to the path.
‘Curses!’ he cries as he slips again, but this time Running Wolf is reaching down. Benjamin stretches his hand up with his fingers extended, ‘as if he were Michelangelo’s God, and I were Adam’, he will joke later. The tribesman’s hand goes past his and grabs onto his wrist, there is a sense of a great upward force, and then he is on the path. William regards him with a mixture of relief and disbelief.
‘You look like a man born out of mud,’ he declares.
‘I came here to discover about mud,’ Benjamin replies. ‘I feel no shame that I have covered myself in it.’
Around them nature’s canvas dances and shifts: ruby-throated hummingbirds, yellow-bellied sapsuckers, ox-eye sunflowers, the white and crystal fury of the river.
‘Come further upstream,’ says Running Wolf. ‘The river is slower there. You can wash the mud off…’
‘… and then you can mix it with bear’s entrails and paint it on again…’ says William.
The tribesman’s eyes flicker towards Benjamin, who smiles and shakes his head.
‘My brother shares not my passion for art.’
‘It is fine enough when it sits quietly on a canvas,’ replies William.
‘He understands not that I want to talk to people for whom paint is a part of life and death, of war and celebration.’
‘You will do anything to gain an advantage over other artists.’ William’s eyes spark. ‘If you had to go to Hades and back to get a colour that no one had used, I’d wager you would do it.’
A large clot of mud falls off Benjamin West’s cheek as he considers a reply. The two brothers stare at each other. Two men standing either side of an obsession – Benjamin’s eyes ablaze, William’s eyes shiny with mockery. They hear the same words, yet the words stir emotions in each man that the other cannot comprehend.
‘It is bear’s grease, not bear’s entrails,’ Benjamin eventually says more seriously.
‘I see not a great difference. The bear still dies.’
‘Mr William,’ says Running Wolf. ‘Let us go. Your brother needs to wash. There will be someone who can teach you to fish with a spear.’
A look of sly amusement crosses Benjamin’s face.
‘Is not his tongue sharp enough?’
‘I speak thus because I love you, brother.’
Benjamin reaches out with a muddy hand and grabs William’s till it too is encased in dirt. He looks into his eyes. ‘Then taunt me no longer.’
A truce is established with a look, and the three men walk on together. The morning sun has returned after two days of rain – dragonflies dance, and a bald eagle soars overhead. That day William catches six fish, and Benjamin learns secrets that will stay with him for the rest of his life. But right now all is the rushing river, the heat of the sun, the whirr of insect wings and the different rhythms of birds, the shivers in the grass, the darting of lizards, and the thick, clinging mud.
Voyage to the Old World, 1760
At the age of twenty-one, Benjamin West is on a sugar-merchant’s ship heading for Italy. There will be a point in his life when he will ask himself if this is where it all started to go wrong. But as he embarks all he can sense is the swirl of sea against the prow and a silver sun breaking through early morning cloud. His old life is packed up in a trunk and the possibilities of the new one hang in the briny air.
A wealthy patron has recognised his talent and has offered to send him five thousand miles away and three hundred years back in time. Titian, Raphael and Da Vinci are some of the artists West shall study – he shall also witness the dissection of human corpses, and sketch according to the Golden Ratio.
His excitement at what is to come sustains him through a voyage that proves tedious apart from an incident in the third week when a pig escapes and causes uproar below decks. On a morning raw with the sound of seagull cries, a sixteen-year-old boy goes to dispatch the animal for that evening’s dinner. But whether it is the gleam of the knife, or the look in the boy’s eye, the pig scents oblivion and decides it does not want to meet it. One flash of steel, and the swine turns battering ram. The boy runs to hide, while the animal pants and squeals between the galley and the storeroom.
West is one of the men who helps to catch it. It is a moment of strange joy amid the tedium. On the night of the pig’s attempted escape, he sits in his cabin and draws the incident in his journal. Working with black chalk held in a porte-crayon, he takes much time over the pig’s fleshy snout and the contours of a belly that seems continental in size compared to the stumpy promontories of its legs. He does eight or nine sketches of the men trying to catch the animal, observing how the different angles of the bodies affect the sense of speed and chaos within the picture. ‘If it is done the right way, a picture can contain past, present and future,’ he murmurs. He stares at his final image, then, dissatisfied, rips out the page and screws it up.
He goes to lie on the uncomfortable narrow bunk that has been warden to his nights since the ship set sail from Philadelphia. As he struggles to fall asleep, his memories of the furore merge with the commotion that arose when, two months beforehand, he announced to his family at dinner that he would make this trip to Europe. He remembers his brother, sees again the outrage on his face. When he eventually spoke, his words were full of contempt.
‘It is ambition that drives you from us. Our grandfather risked everything to come from England with William Penn. Why can you not honour him by building your life here and supporting our parents?’
‘It is not ambition,’ he chided him. Though in truth he could not say what the excitement was that gripped him. The taste of unknown cities, untried ideas, the sense that the future had become a cliff edge from which he might either soar or plunge.
His mother watched them keenly.
‘Benjamin is doing exactly what his grandfather would have wished him to do,’ she declared.
He understood her too well not to recognise that she was upset, but knew also that she would be mortified if he stayed behind for her. William raised the level of attack.
‘There is a chip of ice in your heart. I have witnessed it all too often. Most of the time you are an honourable man, but whenever you get the chance to advance yourself, you will do whatever is needed, no matter who suffers.’
There were tears in his eyes that he blinked away quickly. Benjamin realised that in his anger he too was trying to conceal a fear of losing him. He reached out a hand. But his brother backed away, glaring.
He felt the tears in his own eyes.
‘When have I made others suffer?’
‘What of your fiancée, Elizabeth, right now? You were to be married this summer. What is she going to say?’
Benjamin took a deep breath.
‘I would not be who I am if I did not take this opportunity. I hope and pray that she will be content to await my return.’
He groped to say something more. Of the struggle he felt it had been to become a painter. Of how he was no natural scholar, so every fact and technique he had mastered was a triumph of stubbornness. Of how the words jumbled in his head when he read books, so he had learnt to make a virtue out of learning through experiment and conversation, doggedly taking apart each idea he was told and building it up again until it finally made sense. Of his instinct that this journey would teach him a hundred times more than black marks on a page. Yet he saw the expression on his brother’s face, and realised that rather than explain this, it was wiser to say nothing.
‘So she believes you will return?’ William said finally. It was as much a question as a challenge.
‘I am going to Europe.’ He attempted weakly to make a joke: ‘I will not fall off the edge of the world. I will be back by the end of the year.’
William shook his head.
‘You may tell yourself that is true. But I will certainly not waste my time by believing it.’
He stalked out of the room and into the night.
Italy
When the ship eventually docks in Pisa, the land appears to rock beneath Benjamin West for two days. His sense of elated terror is added to by the fact that in 1760 he is the only American that most Italians have met. He realises quickly that many who encounter him judge him as a curiosity. He squirms under their scrutiny like a clam prised open by a bear.
Before arriving in Italy, he has imagined it as a world of fantasy. A mountain range of domed cathedrals; ancient libraries filled with papery whispers; metallic choruses of bells and alleyways dirty with history. His head has been filled with myths of babies suckled by wolves; with glittering treasures stored by the Medicis; with a land lofty with pagan gods and bombastic with popery.
But reality comes with a twist. Within a few days he begins to realise that he is engaged in a fight he had not anticipated. He has English grandparents, so considers himself to have an affinity with Europe. Yet the Italians he meets view it differently. Quickly he sees that many of them are not just ignorant of his own culture, they are contemptuous of it. He discovers this with most embarrassment on the afternoon that a cardinal takes him on a tour of the Vatican with a group. The cardinal’s holiness has a stench of condescension – he quips loudly on meeting West that he is disappointed to realise he is not a Native American.
West starts to talk about the summers he has spent hunting and shooting with tribesmen, about the painting techniques he has learnt on the riverbank. But with a swift turn of the head, the cardinal indicates he is not interested in a reply of any kind. West feels cowed until, towards the end, they come to the seven-foot-high statue of the Apollo Belvedere. Turning to the group, the cardinal describes it in pinched, saintly tones as the greatest classical statue in existence, the embodiment of physical perfection, one of Italy’s greatest treasures. His words drift in the arid air. West stops listening to him – stares at the statue to see what his instincts tell him. And suddenly he feels as if he is back in Pennsylvania again. He sees that it has been sculpted to look as if it has just fired an arrow, sees the tension of the muscles, the tilt backwards of the body, the strange sense of blood flowing vigorously beneath the stony flesh. Filled with pride, he declares, ‘Now this is worthy of comparison with a Mohawk Warrior.’
But he has miscalculated. The laughter and gasps rise around him. He looks at the cassocks, breeches and waistcoats, the cerebral expressions, the bodies corseted by decorum. He sees how he has been judged vulgar for associating the naked statue with a living breathing man. He feels angry embarrassment that what he has intended to be a compliment has been seen by everyone else as an unacceptable mockery of a classical ideal.
As the outrage increases, West realises that just as he must learn to understand the Europeans’ continent, he must battle to make them understand his. Here in the Vatican art suddenly seems to be about ghosts fermented in wine and trapped in stone, the voices of a thousand dead men, dust and superiority. He vows to master every technique he can, while never forgetting the mountains, forests and endless skies of the landscape that has made him. In Florence he perfects chiaroscuro and gazes endlessly at green-faced Madonnas, in Ravenna he stares at mosaics that shimmer like fish caught by the morning sunlight. In the cutthroat salons of Europe’s intellectuals he gradually starts to gain acceptance.
His letters home show none of the problems he encounters. They mark the triumphant progress of a young American abroad. He never mentions the frequent bouts of illness that hint at his unhappy state of mind, even when he is laid low for months in Florence. He does not talk of the times that he wishes he were just a canvas on a wall, the times that a snide remark makes him wish to punch someone, the times that he aches to smell Pennsylvanian air again. At this point it is only the pressure of paying his patron in new artworks that stops him from returning home before the end of the first summer.
And then the tide turns. He cannot say exactly how and when that is. There is no steady progression – just advances and retreats, shimmers and surges. Small epiphanies, such as the evening where he arrives in Venice. A sense of fantasy about what he observes, as if it is all a figment of a sea-god’s imagination. Something dirty about the beauty – the history of each palazzo imbued with bloodshed, licentiousness, poisoned rivalries and corruption. He sees Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin Mary – a painting that once reinvented composition and colour, and it turns him inside out. The clashes of reds and golds, Mary smaller than the apostles and yet more vivid, a sense of swaying and light. In Florence, Massaccio’s Expulsion from the Garden of Eden will also give him a sense of broken rules and liberation. Bodies hunched with despair that somehow speak of a new world. A sense of eloquence that he cannot precisely describe. Yet he tries to reproduce it again and again in shabby notebooks.
Brushstroke by brushstroke, Europe starts to change him. He discovers like minds, wins accolades, starts to walk taller and prouder. The months abroad turn to years. Each time he puts a date on a letter that he writes home, he realises his brother is winning their argument, but he is starting to enjoy the new rhythm of his life, the continuing sense of fresh perceptions, the belief that he is gaining hard-won respect. As the commissions flood in, any sense of guilt is drowned out by the louder noise of opportunity. In the salons he is known as ‘The American’ – where once the description was a form of disdain, now it is a warm acknowledgement. He thinks he has won a victory. Yet he does not recognise how the word ‘American’ is like a hinge from which attitudes will swing back and forth throughout his life. Right now it is a term of acceptance, but in the more distant future it will adapt equally easily to tones of hostility, fear, and even mockery once again as the world around him changes.
It is on an early evening in October 1762, when the stones of Rome seem saturated in gold, that he decides he should delay his return to the country he professes to love no longer. He sits and writes letters to both his family and fiancée that he will be back in the spring. But for reasons he cannot entirely understand the pieces of paper are still sitting on his desk a week later when a letter arrives from his patron. He breaks the seal while eating bread and partridge at breakfast. In it is an invitation to London. It is the work of a moment for him to accept it.
Britain
A set of two pictures. In the first, it is 1763. The sky is grey and hurls down raindrops like mockery. West is not sure yet what attracts people to this city. The Thames and its ferment of corpses and excrement seems no substitute for either pure blue Pennsylvanian lakes or the warm Mediterranean. He has little conception that he will spend the rest of his life here. What he does know is that though he has travelled more extensively than many who are twice his age, he still feels less educated and articulate than the wits and fops who see themselves as the city’s predators.
All these details lie outside the frame. Inside it is the self-portrait West creates that year. Some might call the image a lie, others a paradox. Still others might call it a declaration of intent. There is no sign in this picture of how disconcerted he feels. He sports a grey powdered wig with panache, while his black hat is tilted at a jaunty angle. He has the full-blooded complexion of one who is in good health, while his long straight nose lends him an air of distinction. One half of his face is in shadow, so that just one dark eye stares at us as if to challenge us. With his left hand he clasps an easel. In this moment, the portrait of the artist is more substantial than the man it represents.
Soon, however, the image and reality will conflate. The arc of ambition that William has noted is carrying West upwards, and wealthy patrons and acclaim are waiting in the wings. In London, the teeming city – with its vagabonds and tradesmen, exiles and patriots, dukes and beggars, opportunists and innocents waiting to be corrupted – he will be one of the survivors. Within a month he will write to his mother that he has an introduction to the King.
And then there will be one political revolution. And after that a second. All certainties will rise up into the air like ashes from a fire. The young man’s portrait is replaced by that of a fifty-eight-year-old. A man both augmented and weighed down by his experiences, the pink bloom in the cheeks replaced by vascular red threads, the eyes corrupted by uncertainty. A man whose upright shoulders show he is well acquainted with the taste of success yet whose bitter set of the chin demonstrates he is not a little marked by the scourges of envy. A man who has learnt that all that was once unpredictable is now even more unpredictable, for whom the edict that the only true wisdom is in knowing one knows nothing rings darkly true.
A man for whom, right now, the Provises are just shadows in a world of shadows. All he knows is that they exist, and that finally the laws of chance have seen fit to cross their path with his. They are somewhere out there amid the passing carriages and the clatter of horse-hooves, their voices just more sounds amid the beggars’ cries, paupers’ wails, whorehouse groans, and tattle of aristocrats. London is the teeming city, filled with all manner of humankind. What do they really have to offer in this, the world’s largest city, so many bodies pressing themselves together in the dirty streets seeking the hope that somehow they cannot find in the green fields beyond?