Wedding artifacts from kimonos to crowns on exhibit at Peabody Essex Aug 16, 2008
Neither did the impressive marriage proposal - a painted self-portrait framed in a silver locket - sent by an 18-year-old Benjamin West to his beloved, Elizabeth Steele. Steele kept the miniature but rejected West. (Boston Globe)
Basement treasures Apr 19, 2008
But figure sketches and compositional studies in oils can also be highly revealing and attractive, and I notice that among 15 works by the early American Benjamin West there are several of these, quite different in style from his larger finished works. This sort of object reflects the interest the museum has always had at heart: the interest in artistic process. (Guardian Unlimited -- Arts)
Critic's Log: 20 turning points in art Dec 13, 2007
11: The Death of General Wolfe by Benjamin West, which manages to turn the conventions of the mythological painting onto not merely the historical event, but the current event. In a way, each of these choices is a step on a road from stylization and convention to a more aware and awake attempt to engage with the experience of being alive, with what we might call a more "real" vision of the world. (AZCentral -- Entertainment)
Clermont honors boat that changed the world May 2, 2007
He started a career as a portrait painter, with Benjamin West as his mentor, and he continued painting his whole life. But he added engineering to his repertoire on a visit to Europe, where his patron, Robert Livingston, had been appointed ambassador to France by President Thomas Jefferson. (Hillsdale Independent, NY)
Fountain's namesake was famed sculptor Feb 7, 2007
Frederick William MacMonnies was born in 1863 in Brooklyn Heights, N. Y. His mother was a relative of famous American painter Benjamin West. In 1880, at the age of 17, MacMonnies began work at the New York City studio of notoriously high-strung artist Augustus Saint-Gaudens. (Eufaula Tribune, AL)
