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“Goddess (he cry’d) these glorious arms that shine
With matchless art, confess the hand divine.
Now to the bloody battle let me bend :
But ah! the relicks of my slaughter’d friend!
In those wide wounds thro’ which his spirit fled,
Shall flies, and worms obscene, pollute the dead?
That unavailing care be laid aside,
(The azure goddess to her son reply’d):
Whole years untouch’d, uninjur’d shall remain,
Fresh as in life, the carcase of the slain.
But go, Achilles (as affairs require)
Before the Grecian peers renounce thine ire:
Then uncontroll’d in boundless war engage,

And heav’n with strength supply the mighty rage!”

Alexander Pope’s translation of Homer’s The Iliad, Book XIX, lines 25-38

This exceptionally well-preserved mythological painting by Benjamin West, hitherto unknown until its re-emergence at auction from a private Swedish collection in 2019, belongs to a series of paintings in which the artist embarked upon a ‘radical redirection’ in his style. Arising out of the end of a period now known as his ‘Dread Manner’, West began at the start of the nineteenth century to pioneer a new type of Classical corporeality. An inquiry into original ways of figure-formation was explored by him within a framework of what Robert Rosenblum came later to define as ‘Romantic Classicism’ - the convergence of the two dominant artistic trends at the time - whereby Greek and Roman forms were interwoven with Romantic themes. His traditionally distingué presentation of classical subjects was reinvented, between 1796 and 1809, in to powerful and dramatic scenes of action. The present picture, dated 1804, is a pivotal example from the end of this period. Closer analysis of its subject-matter, composition, symbolism and sources reveal the ever-evolving ideas of a long-established artist whose vigorous penetrancy of judgement and resourceful absorption of disparate contemporary and antique influences, helped prevent his art from devolving into a state of conventional thinness.   

Thetis bringing the Armour to Achilles was a subject Benjamin West painted on six known occasions between 1804 and 1806. All of these versions, apart from the present picture and one other, which has been lost since 1917, are in museums. In addition, all of these paintings, except for the picture being discussed here, represent the same opening fourteen lines of Book XIX from Alexander Pope’s translation of The Iliad. They are repetitions of the same theme and composition. In illustrating these lines, West shows the goddess Thetis visiting her son Achilles, who has been grieving over the body of his childhood friend and intimate companion, Patroclus. Thetis brings with her the newly forged suit of armour, made by Hephaestus to replace Achilles’s armour which Patroclus had been wearing when he was slain by Hector.

In 1805, two different versions of Thetis Bringing the Armour to Achilles, were exhibited by West in the  annual exhibition at the Royal Academy (nos. 139 and 151). Separate passages from Book XIX of Pope’s translation of The Iliad, were placed underneath the titles of the individual paintings in the exhibition catalogue. The first quotation, as discussed above, are lines 1-14 which describes the arrival of Thetis and her address to her suffering son. This excerpt was affixed under the title of the no.139 exhibit. The painting, now lost, was commissioned by Thomas Hope (1769-1831) in 1805. It is, however, known through the engravings of William  Bond (1809) and Henry Moses (1811) as well as from the impressive full-size oil sketch owned by the Royal Academy, London. A year later in 1806 it was re-worked by West into a horizontal arrangement. The additional space in the composition allowed the artist to include the Myrmidons in the left part of the scene.

The second Thetis Bringing the Armour to Achilles  painting from the 1805 exhibition, no.151, whose whereabouts had been unknown to modern scholarship, is the picture under discussion. The painting illustrates lines 25-38 from Book XIX, quoted in full at the top of the first page. The passage commences with Achilles admiring the divine craftsmanship of the arms Thetis has brought him. He then declares 'to the bloody battle let me bend’. The quotation closes with Thetis urging her son to engage ‘in uncontoll’d boundless war/and heaven with strength supply the mighty rage’. The composition, as described in these lines, was originally conceived by the artist in a chalk sketch - on the verso of a sheet now in the Morgan Library and a pencil study in the Royal Collection. The two sketches on the recto of the Morgan Library sheet, illustrating lines 1-14, correspond to the 1804 painting in LACMA’s collection. Our version of the subject depicting an active Achilles, explored and initiated in the Morgan Library and Royal Collection drawings, has until now only been known from a lithograph, printed in reverse from the painting by West’s friend Henry Corbould (1787-1844), and published in 1820. 

The scene shows Achilles who, whilst holding his sword aloft in his raised right hand, extends his body upwards and flashes his burning gaze defiantly towards both his sword and the heavens. Thetis, half-covered by a translucent cerulean peplos, floats gracefully at the end of the bier. She motions with open hands towards the shield and also to the cuirass and greaves that shine upon the floor. 

According to Ruth Kraemer, Helmut von Erffa & Allen Staley this painting must be the picture exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1805 as no.151. Erffa and Staley reasoned in their catalogue raisonné that “the painting is the only known version of the subject sufficiently unlike the Hope painting for West to have shown the two together in the same exhibition. Whereas it provides a sequel and an appropriate companion, all the other versions would have appeared as redundant repetitions… Thus, it would appear to belong to the image of an active Achilles who has taken the armour rather than the brooding figure in the others.”

The painting represents one of the most significant moments in The Iliad. Up until this point in the poem we have been tirelessly waiting for Achilles to return to the fight. The turning point is the exact moment shown here. Achilles has become ‘the revenge-hero’ - his grief has been transformed into resolute action. It is his love for Patroclus and not just an ambition for public acclaim, or everlasting glory (kleos) which now arguably most determines Achilles’s decision to rejoin the battlefield. What we see, painted with exquisite delicacy and an impressive communication of force, is the start of Achilles’s ungovernable monomania for revenge, his fury (mênis) and fervour to slaughter Hector for the death of Patroclus. West encapsulates what Pope translates in line 22 of Book XIX as a ‘stream of fire’ into the figure and pose of Achilles. The form’s controlled radiation of heroic energy is but the genesis of Achilles’s transmutation into something beast-like or more precisely, a frightening force of destruction. Merciless to those he will soon strike down, 'all grim with dust, all horrible in blood'.

The attention which Benjamin West gave to this small but significant group of Thetis bringing the Armour to Achilles paintings is demonstrated by the large number of drawings he made in preparation for them. Some of the most pertinent studies relating to the current painting are illustrated here. Ranging from compositional studies and individual designs of specific components such as Achilles’s helmet - to a massing of more general ideas upon a single sheet, this preparatory material was in essence a seedbed from which West could extrapolate pre-conceived forms and ideas. It seems likely that the artist began working on illustrations to these particular Homeric passages as early as 1802, which is attested to by dated watermarks on a couple of the preparatory sheets. Interestingly, this was at least two years before the first of the Thetis paintings was made. One of the more finished drawings is a study of Achilles’s legs which corresponds to his pose in all of the painted versions, although the stance is slightly narrowed in the present and New-York Historical Society paintings. Additionally, in the picture now at LACMA and the painting under discussion, the pose is reversed along the vertical axis. Perhaps most striking about West’s modelling of this position is the prominent presentation given toAchilles’s feet or, more significantly, his right heel. Our picture gives extra emphasis to this arrangement. Raised upon a stool and positioned halfway up to the sea-line and slightly off-centre, it rests in an arched position upon the lower folds of Achilles’s baryte coloured chlamys. Through the use of colour, light and form, the artist prefigures the hero's death by encouraging the viewer to rest his gaze on this single point. West draws our attention to the raised heel by creating channels that lead the eye to it. The reflections emanating from the shield which are shown as pellucid sweeping rays, shine down through Achilles’s lap and cascade on to the chlamys to his heel. The same result is achieved through the gesturing hands of Thetis. Even if the viewer begins with the upheld sword the eye eventually traces downwards through the form of Achilles’s cold white body to the arced heel.  

The thoughtful construction of the helmet in this painting further demonstrates the free but judicious manner in which West assimilated and remodelled earlier precedents. Achilles’s helmet is held in his left hand between his own head and Patroclus’s. Three horse statuettes provide additional ornamentation to the helmet whilst also allowing West to transform what would have been a single-crested helmet into a four-crested one. The design of the helmet was inspired, in part, by John Flaxman’s helmets for both Mars and Achilles in his Iliad illustrations, see Thetis Bringing the Armour to Achilles, 1792-3. Greek vase painting and surviving Grecian bronze helmets almost certainly provided further sources of inspiration. As John Britton has stated, West drew ‘with scrupulous regard to the best specimens of Greek costume.’ Notwithstanding the painterly and rhythmical effect that the more substantial multi-crested plume gives to the aesthetics of the painting, there is perhaps a more subtle and symbolic reason for its inclusion. The presence of three horse figures atop the helmet appears to be West’s own invention. The two horses on the outside are winged, an indication of their divine status and certainly a reference to Achilles's command of two immortal horses, Balios and Xanthos. They had originally been given by Poseidon to Achilles’s father King Peleus, on the occasion of his marriage to Thetis, who in turn later gave the horses to his son. Achilles had brought both of them to Ilium to draw his chariot. In Book XVI of The Iliad, a non-divine ‘trace horse’ named Pedasos is also yoked to the chariot by Achilles. It was Patroclus who used to care for, feed and groom these horses and in Book XVII, Automedon, Achilles’s charioteer, describes how only Patroclus was able to fully control these stallions. When Patroclus is slain in battle, Xanthos and Balios (Pedasos the mortal ‘trace-horse’ had just been killed) stood motionless amidst the fighting and wept. It is surely no coincidence that West chose to include three horses on the helmet, two of which are winged, between the heads of Achilles and Patroclus.

In the last decade of the eighteenth century, West began to paint with greater archaeological interest, resulting in more accurate and distinctive depictions of armour, dress and classical decor than those seen in his earlier paintings of Graeco-Roman subjects. Perhaps a principal reason for this change was the patronage of Thomas Hope the ‘champion of the Greek Revival style’ - who commissioned West to paint three pictures ‘from the Greek History’ - one of which was the now lost, large Thetis bringing the Armour to Achilles painting. However, the Hope commission came in 1805 and West by this point had been painting in the revised style for several years. What can be seen as having had more of a decisive effect was the artist’s election in 1792 to the Society of Dilettanti. The Dilettanti, which had been founded in 1734, actively sponsored and promoted the study of ancient Greek and Roman art. Their overarching aim was to encourage "at home a taste for those objects which had contributed to their entertainment abroad." The Dilettanti, during the last quarter of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth century, was notable for funding archaeological expeditions and sponsoring the printing and distribution of important volumes, which included the pre-eminent 1809 illustrated publication 'Specimens of Ancient Sculpture Aegyptian, Etruscan, Greek and Roman: selected from different collections in Great Britain'. West’s earlier Neo-Classical style of the 1760s, in which the influence of Raphael and Poussin can readily be seen, was re-configured in to “an emphatically archaeological and Grecian Style.” A new understanding and appreciation of Greek vase painting and Ancient Greek sculpture begins to be discernible in his late Neo-Classical works. The framing becomes tightly enclosed, forms are more mannered, outlines are painted with greater markedness and compositions become flattened and spread out. The action of the narrative is brought to the front of the picture. This progressive new way of painting, as first popularised in graphic form by the linear outline designs of Flaxman, was further ornamented by the compositional logic and visual expression provided by Classical Greek relief sculpture. West in later life reaffirmed in words what he had earlier represented through painting, “The Greeks, above all others, afford us the best and most decided  proofs of the beauty arising from the philosophical consideration of the subject intended to be represented….. the arts obtained their high meridian in Greece.”

The pronounced form and pose of Achilles is central to the picture’s structure, design and meaning. Seen within the wider context of contemporary classicism it visibly corresponds to the concept of ‘the sharply delineated sculptural body [being] the most prominent, significant and active feature of the work’. Indeed, the form of Achilles fills the picture plane. His stretched body spans almost 8/10ths of the vertical height and close to 7/10ths of the horizontal length. It seems probable that one of West’s main sources for the form of this dynamic Achilles was the colossal marble sculpture known as The Quirinal Dioscuri, which he would have seen in Rome in the early 1760s. The powerful open stance and pose of the horse tamers provides a model of forcefulness and extended elastic tension which West has exaggerated here, and altered there, for his depiction of Achilles. There is a sketch (Fig. 8) amongst the earlier sheets of studies, made in preparation for the group of Thetis paintings, which shows a straightforward delineation of one of the Dioscuri. Guido Reni’s engraving of Hercules sitting on a Burning Pyre and the straining figure of Laocoön also seem likely to have influenced the heroic torsions of West's Achilles. In 1803, the year before the present picture was painted, Henry Fuseli commissioned by Sir Thomas Lawrence, exhibited a now lost painting at the Royal Academy which illustrated the theme of Psychostasy (the weighing of souls). Three drawings made in preparation for this painting still survive. One drawing depicts Memnon, the King of the Ethiopians, and Achilles, about to fight in single combat in the Trojan War. In a drawing now at the Morgan Library, Memnon lies dead in the foreground on his shield whilst Achilles raises his spear victoriously to the sky. In both of these drawings Fuseli’s treatment and manipulation of Achilles’s body is indubitably similar to the pose and bearing of Achilles in the present painting. The positioning of the legs, tilt of the head, and fully stretched out right arm held skyward are the three dominant characteristics found in both versions. The attitude of Achilles in the present painting, encapsulated most concentratedly in his look of defiant determination, directed towards the heavens, can be perceived as more than just a pose of resolution or revenge but also as an entreaty to the Gods, or even, in the spirit of Hercules, one of undaunted defiance. 

In 1802, Benjamin West was part of a group of Royal Academicians who used the short-lasting Peace of Amiens to travel to Paris to visit the Louvre and view contemporary French painting in th e Salon. Although West was critical of much of what he saw, declaring that the French now “paint statues” - his work over the next few years shows a direct stylistic debt to what he encountered during this trip. We know he saw and discussed Jacques Louis-David’s Intervention of the Sabine Women with Fuseli, and Farington, who documented the occasion. Nevertheless, it was Pierre-Narcisse Guérin’s sensationalised and more affected style of painting which most impressed West. Indeed, he later declared that Guérin “had carried the art further than David or any other of their Artists.” Guérin’s principal exhibit at the Salon in 1802 was the Phaedra and Hippolytus. Its brooding, pulsating energy, theatrical poses and precision in the details of Greek dress, decor and armour typifies what West was soon to paint. The fact that this picture made a marked impression on West can be seen in the present painting where the fall of light on Achilles’s shield has most likely been modelled on Guérin’s treatment of Theseus’s shield. 

The shield of Achilles, as described by Homer in Book XVIII, is made up of three main decorative parts. The centre is composed of the heavens and the earth. The waves of the ocean emboss the outer circumference of the shield, and the intermediate section is divided into twelve compartments with three images of a town in peace, three of a town at war, three of agriculture and the final three illustrations depicting scenes of pastoral life. John Flaxman’s shield in Thetis bringing the Armour to Achilles made for his Iliad series is a primary source, besides Homer’s ekphrasis, used by West for the design of his own shield of Achilles. West has varied a few elements of the decorative scheme found on Flaxman’s shield, the most notable being the removal of the sun’s silhouette which Flaxman shows in the centre of his shield. West has instead chosen to use a solar emblem on Achilles’s breastplate. For the central part of his shield, West has probably looked to an earlier model, Nicolas Vleughels's design which was published in 1720 in vol. V of Pope’s trans  lation of The Iliad.

West’s graceful figure of Thetis floating with ethereal enchantment against the swirl of coloured light and cloud, owes much to Flaxman’s own outline design of Thetis . Flaxman’s impact is immediately perceptible in the sea nymph's physiognomy, hairstyle, studded diadem, half-nudity and the way in which her body suspends in a dignified, sympathetic attitude. His influence, already so prevalent in the present painting, can additionally be observed in how West has painted the stool, both its design and positioning next to the bier, and furthermore, the striking placement of Achilles’s right foot. A more distant precedent for Thetis’s elegant form is the Venus de’ Medici, with additional  quotations perhaps taken from the Capitoline Venus or even Thomas Hope’s Aphrodite of Syracuse which Hope probably brought to England from Naples in 1802. Thetis’s loosely-habited peplos bears distinct similarities to the one worn by the Townley Venus , sold by Charles Townley’s family to the British Museum in 1805.

The present picture’s compositional and narrative construction is intelligently conceived and lyrically articulated; the artist's inventions and selections combine harmoniously within his own distinct idiom. West’s erudite exploitation of visual references, both old and new, help consecrate this picture within a tradition of cultural and symbolic exchange which reaches back into past epochs. What remains clear from the analysis of this painting is  West’s remarkable ability to preserve and transmit ‘inherited’ and rediscovered prototypes and symbols. By retelling the myth to a new audience the story, the symbol and the picture itself persist in being “vocal.” The reemergence of this painting is not only an important addition to the Thetis and Achilles series of paintings, one of Benjamin West’s most original and important projects, but it also signifies the apogee of his interest in mythological subject matter and encapsulates the very essence of European neo-classical painting.