(b ?1781; d ?1839). English painter and theorist. He studied at the Royal Academy Schools, London, and specialized in mythological and historical subjects. His first publicly exhibited work appeared at the Royal Academy in 1803, and in 1805 he won a gold medal for an ambitious work, Bearing the Dead Body of Patroclus to the Camp: Achilles's Grief (exh. London, Brit. Inst., 1807; untraced). He competed unsuccessfully in the British Institution competition of 1816 for battle paintings to commemorate the end of the Napoleonic wars. Guest painted a large-scale Transfiguration altarpiece for the church of St Thomas in Salisbury (1810), possibly an indication of the preference for public rather than private patronage that he later expressed in his book, An Inquiry into the Causes of the Decline of Historical Painting (1829). In this book he bemoaned the low standard of artistic taste in England and the lack of patronage for the 'elevated' genre of history painting. Guest's complaint was articulated by many painters at this time, the most influential of whom were Martin Archer Shee and B. R. Haydon. Guest exhibited regularly at the British Institution and the Royal Academy, his last work appearing in 1839.
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