Today--the day before July 4th--is the birthday of one of the most important and well-known portrait painters of the American Revolutionary era. John Singleton Copley was born in Boston in 1738. His parents were poor Irish immigrants who arrived in the colony two years earlier. We know next to nothing about his childhood, except that he was well educated. At some point, he started painting and it turned out he was very, very good at it.
In 1765, he was living in a Boston whose provincial character he understood all too well, and he was apparently a little unsettled by it. He sent a painting of his entitled Boy With Squirrel to London to have it evaluated by the prestigious Society of Artists. Copley was already comfortable though and getting commissions for portraits; apparently at the moment, he was just wanting some encouragement from the establishment. We’ve all been there.
In London when he saw the piece, Sir Joshua Reynolds, the leading painter of his day, encouraged Copley to cross the Atlantic immediately. He should study art in England “before your manner and taste were corrupted or fixed by working in your little way in Boston.” That he didn’t pull up stakes immediately indicates that Copley wasn’t looking for a transformation of his life just then.
He stayed in the colonies another nine years largely because he was doing wonderfully as a portrait painter. He had as many commissions as he could handle. But in addition to painting wealthy Tories, he also painted future revolutionaries like Sam Adams and Paul Revere. In these portraits, Copley created two of the most vivid and important images of key figures in the American Revolution.
His painting of Sam Adams portrays him confronting the Royal Governor of Massachusetts about the Boston Massacre in 1770 (an event which Revere himself portrayed in prints inaccurately). Historian Robert Hughes called Copley’s Paul Revere portrait, which is one of my favorites, “a manifesto of democratic American pride in work: the radical as craftsman.”
Not leaving the colonies in the mid ‘60s when he first perhaps toyed with the idea, and instead staying until 1774, was crucial because it let Copley more fully develop a masterful material realism that would itself develop into a major component of American art going forward.
In 1767 Copley said that painters cannot live on art only, “though I could hardly live without it.”