Benjamin West and His Cat Grimalkin

Benjamin was seven years old before he ever set ink to paper and made a drawing of his baby niece.

This was unexpected, for Benjamin was a Quaker, and Quakers believed likenesses, and any pictures, were “needless.” What's more, he had never even SEEN a picture! And his picture of Sally turned out to be a remarkable likeness.

His mother showed it to his father some weeks later and waited for a response. Benjamin's enthusiasm convinced his father, who decided that Benjamin could continue to draw if it did not interfere with his chores. It was not a harmful activity and it was no doubt just a phase. It would not last long.

Benjamin loves to draw and he longs to add color to his pictures. But how?

One day, he is out wandering in the forest and begins drawing his Indian friends. The chief is impressed with his drawing and shows Benjamin how to make colors from the red earth and the yellow clay mixed with bear grease. When he gets home his mother gives him a stick of her indigo dye, meant for dying cloth. He can now make every color of the rainbow.

Now he has colors, but a brush made of grass or bark is far from satisfying. Uncle Phineas tells him of an invention that artists use called a “hair pencil”but it is made with camel hair and there are no camels in the colonies. Then one day as he is making a charcoal portrait of his cat, Grimalkin, he has a sudden and wonderful idea! Could it possibly work? Read it to find out!

Leave it to Marguerite Henry, most famous for her horse stories based on true events, to give us a living book, set in the American colonial period, and depicting the childhood of “the father of American painting.” From his boyhood helping his family run their inn in William Penn's woods, to his eye-opening trip to Philadelphia, to that fateful First Day afternoon when the elders decided that he could be allowed to go to Philadelphia and be apprenticed to become a painter, this book will hold your family's attention. The story is filled with beautiful sentences like

“Grimalkin led the way, and the sound of his purring was like the gladness in Benjamin's heart,”

and

“Benjamin tried to speak, but a choking filled his throat. How nice it was that he and Mama did not need words!”

These short, beautiful phrases are perfect for your copywork or dictation exercises.

My only complaint might be that the story doesn't continue through Benjamin West's appointment as president of the Royal Academy of England and as court painter to His Majesty, George III. I long to hear of his refusal of a knighthood, quoting that the only title a Quaker covets is that of “Friend.”

Content Considerations:

None. The colonists in Pennsylvania and Native Americans are respectfully portrayed as friends.