2-730-792 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

Head of a Screaming Man, 1792. After studying in Italy, Benjamin West achieved outstanding success in England, where he served as the second president of the Royal Academy of Arts in London and became a personal friend of King George III. West's earliest paintings were classical and restrained in spirit, but in the 1780s, influenced by the writer Edmund Burke, he became interested in producing grand, terrifying compositions of destruction and apocalypse.