Oil on canvas; 30 1/4 x 25 3/8 in. National Academy Museum, New York, NY.
The circumstances under which Morse's portrait of Benjamin West was painted are not known. It is a copy of the head from the portrait of West by Sir Thomas Lawrence in 1811 (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut).
The Federalists of the 1780s had a glimpse of what America was to become — a scrambling business society dominated by the pecuniary interests of ordinary people — and they did not like what they saw. This premonition of America’s future lay behind their sense of crisis and their horrified hyperbolic rhetoric. The wholesale pursuits of private interest and private luxury were, they thought, undermining America’s capacity for republican government. They designed the Constitution in order to save American republicanism from the deadly effects of the private pursuits of happiness.