Born in Springfield, Pennsylvania, in a house that now sits on the campus of Swarthmore College, West (1738-1820) was among the most prominent, pre-Revolutionary, 18th-century American artists. With financial assistance from wealthy Philadelphia businessmen, he traveled to Italy in 1760 to pursue his artistic training and study the old masters, eventually arriving in England in 1763, where he established himself as a painter of historical scenes and portraits. Over the next few decades, West ascended to the upper eschelons of the English art hierarchy. He was appointed an official court painter by King George III in 1772 and became the second president of the nascent Royal Academy in London, following the inaugural presidency of Joshua Reynolds, in 1792. West's most famous painting The Death of General Wolfe, 1771, is now in the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
