Portrait of Robert Fulton
painting by Benjamin West
Portrait of Robert Fulton is an 1806 portrait painting by the Anglo-American artist Benjamin West depicting the American inventor Robert Fulton.
West was an American-born artist who had emigrated to London, where he enjoyed success with his history paintings and portraits. Succeeding Joshua Reynolds, he was the second president of the Royal Academy from 1792. His career in Britain began before the American War of Independence and lasted into the Regency era.
Fulton was an American engineer who is best known for his development of North River Steamboat which ran on the Hudson River and is considered the first commercially successful steamboat in the world. He was in London and on friendly terms with West when he was painted. Today it is in the collection of the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York.
References
Bibliography
Evans, Dorinda. Benjamin West and His American Students. National Portrait Gallery, 1980.
“Portrait of Robert Fulton” enters the record as painting by Benjamin West. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Portrait, Robert and Fulton can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Portrait of Robert Fulton” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Portrait, Robert and Fulton provides the most credible route into that argument.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q131177042. The first chronological checks are 1806, 1792 and 1980.
Titles can refer to several editions, objects or performances, making precise identification essential before interpretation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Portrait of Robert Fulton” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.