Benjamin West’s Elijah Raising the Widow’s Son depicts the Old Testament prophet miraculously reviving a dead child, who gasps awake. Dramatic light falls across the child’s body, suggesting a divine presence. As a Protestant nation, England had little tradition of religious art after the Reformation, which deemed church paintings and sculptures idolatrous. By the 1770s, however, the tide was beginning to turn, as artists inspired by religious painting in continental Europe began to advocate for the genre at home.

Born in Pennsylvania, West lived most of his life in London and was a founding member and later president of the Royal Academy of Arts. West exhibited this painting at the academy in 1775, and it exemplifies the kind of large-scale narrative painting that the academy encouraged.