THE names of three great Quakers are associated with the city of Philadelphia. William Penn, the founder, who well deserved to transmit his name to the beautiful state, Pennsylvania, of which Philadelphia is the chief city, is well known to every school boy and girl, who, if they have not seen his sturdy and Friend-like figure in the picture of the Treaty Tree, can see it every day, perched high, in rather incongruous fashion, on the tower of the City Hall.
The second great Quaker was Benjamin West, whose name is not so well known by the school-children, or even adult citizens of Philadelphia. In time, when his work is better appreciated by the custodians of Art, and when his masterpieces that are now "skied" almost out of sight in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, are loyally placed in a Benjamin West gallery in the Municipal Art Museum, the good citizens will learn to appreciate the great talents of one who, though born in the precincts of Swarthmore, received full recognition of his genius in England, and who was elected by his fellow-artists President of the Royal Academy of London.
I well remember an engraved portrait of Benjamin West that hung in the dining-room of my father's house. It was placed opposite an engraved portrait of Washington, after the painting by Gilbert Stuart. My father was an admirer
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