John Singleton Copley (1738-1815)

Sources

Painter

Early Years. Copley was born in 1738 to poor and uncultured parents who had emigrated from Ireland. Growing up in a house on Long Wharf in Boston, Copley was at one of the wealthiest centers of commercial trade in the colonies. After his father’s death Copley’s mother married Peter Pelham, a noted engraver who introduced Copley to the artistic culture of England and America. Copley’s first paintings were mythological works such as The Return of Neptune, based on European prints that were consistent with Pelham’s baroque tastes and English training. Pelham’s more lasting influence was to teach Copley that the successful artist had to be an entrepreneur and, like the traders and artisans of Long Wharf, had to create a desire for his commodities amongst an expanding group of affluent, upwardly mobile merchant and professional class, for whom Copley painted more than 60 percent of his pictures. This small group dominated the social, political, and economic world of provincial Boston. In contrast to their forbears, who might have been content to save their money, this group avidly bought luxury goods that had no practical function but which expressed their cosmopolitan tastes and their aspiration to English gentility. Along with silversmiths such as Paul Revere, furniture makers and portrait painters sought to gratify this fad for English style in consumer goods. Portraits in particular offered a vehicle through which the provincial, newly rich bourgeois class could acquire an illusion of aristocratic character.

Success. Copley was so successful in appreciating the desires of his patrons and in fueling demand for his services that his portraits became major status symbols, the possession of which signaled one’s membership in a cultural elite. Despite his own humble origins, Copley turned himself into a gentlemen, sharing the expensive tastes and the self-conscious Englishness of his patrons. In 1769 he married Susanna Farnham Clark, and with the largest annual income of any artist or artisan he was able to build a mansion on exclusive Beacon Hill. Perhaps because Copley was so savvy as an entrepreneur, seeking to give his customers exactly what they wanted, or because he shared their aristocratic ambitions, his portraits offer precise depictions of the materialistic values of his patrons. The lace on a dress, the glint of a button, the polish of a tabletop, the softness of the subject’s hands, the shine of the sitter’s hair: no detail is more important than another, or as his fellow American painter Benjamin West phrased it, the different parts were not subordinated to the face and hands of the sitter but instead competed with them for the viewer’s interest. Objects and persons become interchangeable, fields of contrasting texture, color and light that draw the viewer’s attention not to one central point of interest but all over the canvas.

England. Given the overwhelming importance of English taste as an aesthetic and cultural ideal for ambitious and genteel Americans in the late colonial era, it is not surprising that Copley, like Benjamin West, should have gone to Britain. Copley’s ambition to master an English style of painting led him in 1765 to send a painting of his stepbrother Henry Pelham, Boy with Squirrel, to London for an exhibition at the Society of Artists. While this and later submissions were highly praised by critics and painters, the advice that they offered inevitably concluded that Copley needed to study in England to properly conform to English manner—in his case, to soften and polish the hard lines that now make his

American portraits so oddly striking in their sharp contrasts, minute details, and indivisible brush strokes. Another consideration influenced Copley’s eventual move to England: even though he had cornered the portait market in America, he would always remain merely an artisan there, someone who worked with his hands. In Europe, however, as West demonstrated to his peers, an artist might attain the status of a gentleman. The hostilities that followed the Boston Tea Party made the city an unfriendly place for Copley’s Loyalist patrons. A radical activist even defaced Copley’s portrait of Gov. Francis Bernard during the Townshend duties crisis, cutting out the heart area of the governor; Copley repaired the damage, which did not endear him to the Patriots. Although Copley struggled to remain neutral in the political crisis, his art was rightly linked with Tory values of luxury, idleness, and self-gratification that seemed treasonous to the Republican campaign for frugality, industry, and sacrifice.

Exile. Copley went to London in November 1775, where he spent the rest of his life living in and working for polite society. Since no artist could attain true greatness by confining himself to portraits, Copley began painting large history scenes. In 1778 Copley exhibited Watson and the Shark, which won him membership in the prestigious Royal Academy and secured his reputation as an English painter. It shares a familiar, sharp realism of visual details and, like Copley’s portrait of Paul Revere, shows a democratic interest in plebeian characters: it includes the first sympathetic depiction of a black man by an American artist. Without resorting to caricature Copley paints a heroic sailor standing heroically at the center of the canvas, staring in mute horror at the primal conflict between man and nature, a theme that would be taken up by later American writers such as Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Winslow Homer, and Ernest Hemingway. In its style and composition, however, it marked a major departure from Copley’s American works. The triangular arrangement of figures and collision of horizontal and vertical movement, combined with subtler brushwork throughout, keeps the viewer’s attention firmly on the dramatic event at hand. His next history painting, Death of the Earl of Chatham (1779–1781), was huge in both size and appeal: more than seven by ten feet, the canvas attacted twenty thousand people to a private exhibition.

Importance. While Benjamin West was more successful in his day, Copley has, with the judgment of hindsight, proved to be the most original painter of Revolutionary America. And although Copley moved to Great Britain at the age of thirty-three to complete his rise to stardom and finish his training as an artist, it is mostly the startling, brilliant portraits he did before leaving the colonies for which he is now remembered. Postwar national pride in all things American fueled the reputations of Copley and other expatriates and secured steady commissions from diplomats and other Americans travelling abroad. Copley’s success, like that of West, in guiding his art and career towards the ideal of English taste and ambition had the ironic result of making the paintings of his last decades more conventional. It is in the practical, focused gaze of Copley’s colonial faces, in the seductive textures of the material world itself in which individuals reinvent themselves, where the viewer confronts a peculiarly American personality staring back.

Sources

Robert Hughes, American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (New York: Knopf, 1997);

Jules D. Prown, John Singleton Copley (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966);

Carrie Rebora, Pault Staiti, Erica Hirschler, Theodore E. Stebbins Jr., and Carol Troyen, John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Harry Abrams, 1995);

Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).