
Luke Batterham
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AN INVITATION TO SEE 'DEATH ON THE PALE HORSE'. John Keats had availed himself of an opportunity to see the same picture three months earlier, and wrote: 'I spent Friday evening with Wells & went the next morning to see Death on the Pale Horse. It is wonderful picture, when West's age is considered; But there is nothing to be intense upon; no women one feels mad to kiss; no face swelling into reality' (to his brothers, late December 1817). The picture remained in West's studio until his death, when it was auctioned for 2000 guineas. It is now in the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Thomas Clio Rickman, who West invites to see the picture, was a radical bookseller and an especially close friend of Tom Paine, whose biography he wrote. He has been described as being 'to Paine what Boswell was to Johnson'. His "tribe" of sons bore the suitably republican names of Paine, Washington, Franklin, Rousseau, Petrarch and Volney. From the Enys Collection.