Although Lord Byron attacked "the dotard West, Europe's worst daub, poor England's best," praise for the old man's pictures was so nearly unanimous that it is almost inexplicable today. The can­vases were largely painted by West's assistants; they are windy, va­cant, and relaxed; dull in colour; insipid in characterization; show­ing nothing but the genius for composing a complicated picture which West never lost. Undoubtedly the age of the artist, his cour­age and piety, impressed the public. Lawrence later told the Royal Academy: "The display of such astonishing ability in age, com­bined with the sacred importance of his subjects, gave him a ce­lebrity at the close of his life far greater than he had ever before enjoyed, and he became . . . the one popular painter of his coun-try."

However, the celebrated canvases of his old age have done West's reputation much damage in the long run; they are the platform from which he is denounced by many outraged critics. Now that historical painting is out of fashion and.moralizing elicits wrath, writers love to say that West was a canting humbug who gained celebrity by hypnotizing a demented king. The fury of some of these purifiers of the arts is interesting psychologically; one won­ders why, if they are convinced West is so insignificant, they expend so much hatred in lambasting him. A milder school of critics casts out all West's historical paintings, but admires his portraits. Cer­tainly there is much less in his portraits to offend modern taste, if one can overlook a naked cupid or two, and many of them have a brilliance that is startling when we remember that West despised portrait painting and avoided it whenever he could. Despite his egotism, he urged young men who wanted to study portraiture to work with Reynolds or Stuart. "I seldom paint portraits/' he told Archibald Robertson, "and when I do, I neither please myself or my employers." Perhaps the fact that West did not take his por­traits seriously is responsible for their greater simplicity which ap­peals to modern eyes.

Surrounded with adulation, West saw no sign that his reputation as a historical painter would ever decay. Leigh Hunt describes for us "the mild and quiet artist at work, happy, for he thought himself immortal." In his picture rooms "everybody trod about in stillness, as though it were a kind of holy ground. . . . The talk was very quiet, the neighbourhood quiet, the servants quiet; I thought the , very squirrel in the cage would make a greater noise anywhere else. James, the porter, a fine tall fellow who figured in his master's pic­tures as an apostle, was as quiet as he was strong; standing for his picture had become a sort of religion with him. Even the butler, with his little.twinkling eyes full of pleasant conceit, vented his notions of himself in half-tones and whispers. . . . My mother and I used to go down the gallery as if we were treading on wool." It was fashionable for sensitive young ladies, when brought into the presence of the immortal artist and his moral pictures, to be so moved they burst into tears.

While West was basking in this apotheosis, his younger rival, Wyatt, was killed in a coaching accident, leaving, according to Far­ington, one of his female servants large with child. How could West fail to see shown again, as he so often showed in his pictures, the different rewards for virtue and vice?

Not that his lot was altogether sunny. As the result of a series of strokes his beloved wife had been reduced by 1815 to complete im-, becility; she could neither talk nor move, though she suffered no , pain. West merely became more absorbed in his work and busied himself with enlarging his sketch of Death on a Pale Horse into

a tremendous picture. The seventy-seven-year-old painter allowed himself only five hours a day away from his easel for sleep, and when his son remonstrated with him for eating nothing between breakfast and dinner, he looked up from his canvas long enough to reply that if he took anything in the intervening time he could not paint, as it made him "heady and incapable of application." So convinced was he that he was painting better than ever before, that, despite the remonstrances of Lawrence and Farington, he insisted on touching up the canvases of his prime.

But the old man's brain wandered while his hand, like a well-trained servant, almost automatically laid in the colours. The woods of Pennsylvania spread out before his mind's eye, more green and lush than they had ever been, and he saw his own child­hood self wandering with Indians through the glades of romance. When he told Gait the story of his life, he did not, as we have seen, limit himself to facts; his aged mind threw up images so bright it was impossible to tell what was truth and what was fancy. How could any fancy be stranger than the truth of his career?