George Beck, classicist, born in England in 1749, became instructor of
mathematics at Woolwich Academy, near London, at the age of
twenty-seven years; but he was later dismissed. Beck married an
English woman of culture and emigrated to the United States in 1795,
reaching these shores in time to serve "Mad Anthony" Wayne as a scout
in his Indian campaign. The wanderlust was upon George Beck, and he
became one of the first of that little band of nomadic painters that
came early to the Blue Grass country, and having once come remained.
He arrived at Lexington in 1800; and it was not long before he began
to send short original poems and spirited translations of Anacreon,
Homer, Horace, and Virgil to old John Bradford's _Gazette_. At about
this time, too, Beck was doing many portraits and a group of
landscapes in oils of the Kentucky river country, a few of which have
come down to posterity. Eighteen hundred and six seems to have been
Beck's best year in Kentucky from the literary viewpoint, as the
_Gazette_ is full of his verses and translations. He was widely known
as the "Lexington Horace." Besides painting and poetry, George Beck
was a rather learned astronomer, as his _Observations on the Comet_ of
1811 prove. With his wife he conducted an "Academy for Young Ladies"
for several years. His last years were much embittered by the lack of
appreciation upon the part of the Western public. The Kentucky of 1800
was not a whirlpool of art or literature by any means, and this
cultured man languished and finally died among a people who cared
very little for his fine learning or his manners. George Beck, poet,
translator, mathematician, astronomer, artist, died in Lexington,
Kentucky, December 14, 1812. His wife survived him until the cholera
year of 1833, which swept away nearly two thousand citizens of
Lexington and the Blue Grass.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Kentucky Gazette_ (Lexington, December 22, 1812);
Appletons' _Cyclopaedia of American Biography_ (New York, 1887, v.
i).