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for a later generation. And such works must be popular or they lose all excuse for their
existence. A chosen few may cultivate a liking for quaint, obsolete, old-time sentiment in easel pictures,
prints, or miniatures, but canvases twenty feet or more long are not for the cabinets of amateurs. " Time's
great antiseptic, Style," might have saved them, but they have no " style." West had not even the sincerity
which gives vitality to Copley's work. His early portraits painted before he left New York are occasionally
more graceful than the Copleys of the same date, but they carry no such conviction of
reality.
After he reached Italy he began to paint those "
subjects the moral interest of which outweighs their mechanical execution." He gained great facility and an
acquaintance with all the technical expedients of his profession; but the rapidity of his production, his
admiration for the followers of Raphael, and his early saturation with a vague and windy enthusiasm from
Richardson prevented him from ever gaining any mastery of beautiful workmanship. In fact, he never felt the
need of it and considered his art mainly as an aid to virtue, declaring in his discourses that "the true use
of painting resides in assisting the reason to arrive at certain moral influences, by furnishing a probable
view of the effects of motives and passions." He painted, as a rule, thinly and had a way of marking out his
figures with a sharp outline, suggesting work done from an engraving. His color was poor, the costumes of his
figures tinted in tones of red or pink or yellow, arranged according to the most approved rules and relieved
by dark shadows and backgrounds usually of a disagreeable brownish tone produced perhaps from his admiration
for the old masters of the Bolognese school. Lester (in his Artists of
America) sums up his work in a criticism that is worth giving at
length, for it shows that the judgment of 1848 still remains good to-day with the exception that at that time
West was at least discussed ; to-day he is ignored.
" In all his works the human form was exhibited in conformity to academic precepts — his
figures were arranged with skill — the coloring was varied and harmonious — the eye rested pleased on the
performance, and the artist seemed, to the ordinary spectator, to have done his task like one of the highest
of the sons of genius.
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