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John Singleton: John Singleton Copley
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John Singleton Copley was born in Boston in 1738, and grew up there, training in the visual arts under his step-father Peter Pelham (c. 1697-1751), an English engraver who had immigrated in 1727 and married Copley's widowed mother in 1748. Copley's earliest paintings, from the mid-1750s, reveal the influence of English mezzotint portraits as well as the work of local and itinerant artists. He experimented with many media: oil on canvas, miniatures on copper or ivory, pastel, and printmaking. By the late 1750s he was established as a portrait painter.
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John Singleton Copley, the foremost artist in colonial America, was virtually self-taught as a portraitist. By meticulously recording details, he created powerful characterizations of his Boston sitters. After he emigrated to London in 1774, Copley began to specialize in narrative scenes from history and joined the influential artistic institution, the Royal Academy of Art. Copley demonstrated a genius, in both his American and British periods, for rendering surface textures and capturing emotional immediacy.
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John Singleton Copley unexpectedly illuminated America's colonial sky. The child of poor uncultured parents and only briefly the stepson of artist Peter Pelham, he became by 1760, as if by Providence, the colonies' supreme artist, a position he retained until his departure for London in 1774. His swift ascent and sustained eminence were the result of an innate ability to handle paint and produce images that eclipsed anything executed by his predecessors in America. Through his stepfather, Copley had access to a vast collection of prints after old masters and English portraits, which he employed as the basis for early historical compositions like The Return of Neptune (59.198), and for portraits such as Mrs. Jerathmael Bowers (15.128). In this way, Copley not only learned how to compose his pictures, but ... catered brilliantly to the anglophile predilections of his patrons, who coveted English-style portraits but rarely, if ever, traveled to England. He worked in various media to please patrons, executing paintings, pastels, and miniatures with remarkable dexterity.
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John Singleton Copley was born into the family of an Irish immigrant named Richard Copley and his wife Mary Singleton Copley. Though no record of the birth was made, the date is believed to have been July 3, 1738. His parents owned and ran a tobacco shop in Boston. By 1748, Richard Copley had died, though the exact date of this is ... unknown, but on May 22, 1748 his widow married Peter Pelham, an engraver and teacher, and moved with her son to a quieter and more respectable part of Boston.
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Painted in London, this image is one of only four self-portraits by John Singleton Copley, who is admired today for his realistic depictions of colonial American sitters. His ambition to study painting in Europe, coupled with the increasingly violent events that led to the American Revolution, made him leave Boston for England and Italy in 1774. He spent the second half of his life in London, where he painted several important history paintings, including Watson and the Shark (1778), as well as portraits. As Copley began to paint larger works, he adjusted his meticulous colonial style to a looser, broader technique, in keeping with British fashion in the 1780s. The pose, strong highlighting, and contrasting shadows of this self-portrait are an example of this new manner.
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The portraits of the American painter John Singleton Copley (1738-1815), outstanding for their realism and psychological penetration, are the finest of the colonial period. In England from 1775, he executed historical paintings as well as portraits.
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John Singleton Copley