"But holdl . . . Amid the glare of glass and gilding we do find a niche in every room appropriated to a huge frame surrounding the insipid features of some family portrait. ... It is upon these mawkish and wearisome monotonies that our first artists are now employed. . . . You must live. You cannot live by historical paint­ing. Do you sigh for riches? Turn the whole bent of your mind, expend all your anxious laborious hours in becoming a fashion­able painter of vacant faces."

Now, after more than a half-century of prosperity and fame, West faced destitution. It-seemed in the cards that destiny's darling would die of a stroke as so many disappointed old men do, or at least drag out his remaining years in denunciation of a world that had passed him by. But great reservoirs of strength still lay in the shrunken body of the septuagenarian from the Schuylkill.

VII

West calculated that during the previous thirty years he had averaged less than two hundred pounds annually from selling pic­tures to the public; the Crown had always been his support. But now that royal favour had left him, he was not daunted; he turned to the public with a new will.

When the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia asked him for a contribution toward a new building, West promised them a pic­ture instead, and began on Christ Healing the Sick, a huge canvas containing scores of life-sized figures. Before it was completed, it had received such celebrity that the British Institution bought it for three thousand guineas, the largest sum ever paid in England for a contemporary picture. It was so popular with the public that the Institution made back all but five hundred guineas in gate re­ceipts. A replica sent to Philadelphia brought in twenty-five thou­sand dollars, enough money to enlarge the hospital for thirty more patients. And when prints of the picture were made, they netted West twenty-two hundred guineas. The painter suddenly found himself richer and more famous than he had ever been.

The reverberation of West's triumph penetrated even into the walled chamber of the King's madness; during an unusually lucid moment, George III sent his old friend a word of praise. "It af­forded me inexpressible joy to receive His Majesty's congratula­tions on the successful issue of that picture . . ." West replied on May 25, 1811. "Had the great work of my life on revealed religion of His Majesty's chapel not been checked some years past, that work would by this time be in the same class in art with the one now ex­hibiting. . . . It would have been worthy of His Majesty's pro­tection as a Christian and a patriot king, and all Christendom would have received it with attention and piety." But the towers of madness had risen round the monarch again; West's letter was not answered.

None the less, the painter started on Christ Rejected, an even bigger and more ambitious picture than Christ Healing the Sick. "I expressed my surprise," Farington writes, "at his resolution in undertaking so large a canvas at his time of life, seventy-four years old. He smiled and made light of it." Soon he had refused eight thousand guineas for the picture. When it was exhibited in Pall Mall, the thoroughfare was blocked by eager crowds. A newspaper critic wrote: "The work is indubitably the greatest performance of modern times, and irrevocably-fixes the painter on the highest pinnacle of the temple of fame. Long may he flourish in his green old age, setting a high example to the British school of persever­ance, correctness, elegance, and piety."