La Mort du général Wolfe

When West showed this in London in 1770, the shock wasn't the dying general. It was the coats. History paintings at the time dressed their heroes in Roman togas, and Joshua Reynolds, who ran the Royal Academy, begged West to do the same. West refused. Wolfe had fallen at Quebec 11 years earlier, in 1759, in a red British uniform, and West painted him in one, surrounded by officers in the real dress of their moment. Most of the men gathered around him weren't even there that day. West added them because they had paid, or because they mattered to the story he wanted. Look at the figure kneeling at the left, the Indigenous warrior in a thoughtful pose. He is invented, a stand-in for the New World where no Greek or Roman hero had ever set foot, which was exactly West's argument for the modern clothes.