It was this tension that helped to inform West’s apocalyptic vision. So every day he served the monarch against whom some of his countrymen were fighting, knowing all the while that this same king was launching his own legions against Americans who had once been accounted British subjects. Pennsylvanian born and bred, he was a supporter of American resistance.īut in 1763 he migrated to Britain, and he spent the war working as a historical painter at the court of George III. Bitterly divisive on both sides of the Atlantic, the war imposed strains on West himself. He first sketched out his ideas for Death on the Pale Horse in 1783, the concluding year of the American War of Independence.
Yet West’s original inspiration seems to have been another conflict. It is tempting therefore to see in the painting not only the influence of the book of Revelation, and perhaps the elderly West’s intimations of his own imminent mortality, but also a retrospective verdict on the terrible catalog of death and destruction that had been the Napoleonic Wars. Warriors fall before their swords and spears, and women, children, and babies are slaughtered.īenjamin West completed this version of Death on the Pale Horse in 1817, two years after the Battle of Waterloo. Together, Death, Pestilence, Famine, and War ravage the earth amid blood-red banners and what looks like cannon smoke.
Hurtling across a twenty-five-foot-wide canvas in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The end of the world is on view at Philadelphia. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphiaīenjamin West: Death on the Pale Horse, 1817
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