Benjamin West (1738-1820), the first of America's emigré artists, became one of Europe's most important neoclassic painters.

Benjamin West was born on Oct. 10, 1738, in Springfield Township, Pa., to a struggling innkeeper who had emigrated from England. Though the Wests lived among Quakers, who habitually frowned upon art, Benjamin seems to have been encouraged by all about him from the time he began to draw at the age of six years. He gained a reputation in eastern Pennsylvania as a child prodigy. At first he was self-taught, but later, before his departure for Italy in 1759, he knew the paintings of William Williams and Gustavus Hessalius, whose work he soon surpassed.

Among West's American works produced during the 1750s were the Death of Socrates, forecasting his later neoclassic work; a somewhat fantastic Landscape with Cow (1748), revealing his early dreams of storybook castles; and a lustrous portrait of the young...