Copley, John Singleton

Copley, John Singleton (1738–1815), leading painter of colonial Boston.Of Irish immigrant origins, Copley spent his early childhood in the commercial district of Long Wharf, where his parents sold tobacco. After his father's death and his mother's remarriage in 1748 to the English‐born printmaker Peter Pelham, he moved to Lindel's Row near the Town House, an area of small business trade as well as artisans' studios and shops. Pelham introduced Copley to English artistic culture through books on theory and his own prints. After Pelham's death in 1751, Copley supported his mother and half‐brother Henry by portrait painting, in which he was largely self‐trained. In 1769, he married Susanna Clarke.

Copley painted approximately 350 pictures that gratified the expanding American taste for high style and anglicized images. In the new consumer culture of Boston, Copley portrayed merchants, landowners, and professionals clothed in expensive silks and surrounded by Chippendale furniture, pedigree dogs, and cultivated flowers that collectively evoked their elite status. His sitters included John Hancock, Paul Revere, Jeremiah Lee, Joseph Warren, Samuel Adams, Dorothy Quincy, Mercy Otis Warren, and members of the Boylston and Amory families. His characteristically precise style resulted in crisply defined images and compositions in which objects, whether significant or insignificant, are assigned equal importance. That aesthetic practice elicited the critical attention of the London artists Sir Joshua Reynolds and the Pennsylvania‐born Benjamin West (1738–1820), who urged him to emigrate, which the politically nonpartisan Copley did in 1774.

After a year of studying and painting in Italy, Copley by 1776 was living with his family in London's Leicester Square. In England he turned to large historical subjects, such as Watson and the Shark (1778), The Death of the Earl of Chatham (1779), The Death of Major Peirson (1782–1784), and The Siege of Gibraltar (1787–1791).
See also Colonial Era; Painting: To 1945.

Bibliography

Jules Prown , John Singleton Copley, 2 vols., 1966.
Carrie Rebora and and Paul Staiti , John Singleton Copley in England, 1995.

Paul Staiti