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Life
?-1770; b. Waterford, son of an alderman; early life otherwise unknown; trained in Paris at the French Academy under François Boucher and Vanloo [viz. Carle Vanloo/ Charles Van Loo] acc. John O’Keeffe’s Recollections (1826); est. drawing school in George’s Lane, which was subsided by the Royal Dublin Society from 1754, and afterwards appt. master of RDS at Shaw’s Court, 1757, trhough the influence of Samuel Madden [q.v.];; he became mentally deranged in 1763 and was replaced by Jacob Ennis, but returned to health and retained the post until his death in Nov. 1770 - the year in which Ennis also died; West’s son Francis Robert succeeded him in the RDS post, and was succeeded in turn by Robert Lucius West. DIB
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Commentary
Ann Cruikshank & the Knight of Glin, Irish Portraits 1600-1860 [Catalogue] (1969), p.44, cites his Drawing School in George’s Lane, founded in the 1740s and taken over by the RDS mid-1740s; Pasquin says of him, ‘He principally excelled in his drawing of the human figure in chalk and crayons’; no drawing by him is known.
[ There is a Wikipedia article on West - online; accessed 21.07.2023. ]
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