John Singleton CopleyVereinigte Staaten, 1738–1815Thomas Boylston II (1721-1798)
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John Singleton Copley was among the most prominent portraitists in colonial Boston. In 1766, he was commissioned to paint three portraits of the Boylston family, which had amassed a fortune sending enslaved Africans and foreign goods to the Americas. Like many of his Boston portraits, Copley’s likenesses are a blend of fact and fiction. He combined detailed renderings of the sitters’ faces and garments with invented settings to convey the family’s wealth and status.
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Copley portrayed the Boylstons in extravagant imported clothing. Sarah (1696–1774), seen in the portrait nearby, wears a sumptuous satin dress, while her sons are draped in richly textured dressing gowns, or “banyans,” exotic attire that conveyed their cosmopolitan identity and global power. Other elements in the portraits, like the large ledgers and the ship in this portrait of Nicholas (1716–1771), suggest the family’s mercantile identity without showing what—or whom— they traded.
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Im Leben von John Singleton Copley
Das ganze Leben1753–1774 · Wirkungsort
Boston
1766
“A Boy with a Flying Squirrel” at the London exhibition
The exhibition of 1766 establishes Copley’s fame in England. Joshua Reynolds speaks warmly of the picture, saying that with a proper artistic education Copley could become a master of world stature.
4 August 1766
West urges Copley to study in Europe
By one account, on receiving the picture without the painter’s name West exclaimed that its colouring was worthy of Titian, and he got it into the exhibition; on 4 August he writes to Copley of Reynolds’s interest and advises a visit to Europe of three or four years. In October and November Copley gladly agrees to send more pictures but laments that no portrait worthy of the name of a picture has been brought to Boston within his memory.
3 September 1766
Elected to the Society of Artists of Great Britain
By vote of 3 September 1766, “A Boy with a Flying Squirrel” makes the young Boston painter a Fellow of the Society of Artists of Great Britain.
17 June 1768
Explains to West why he is not yet coming to Europe
Copley writes that he would go only with a very good prospect of doing as well there as at home: his present income of 300 guineas a year is a fair living in America, and his mother and young brother depend on him. West replies on 20 September that he has talked over Copley’s prospects with London artists, who agree that he has nothing to hazard.
16. November 1769
Married: Susannah Farnum Clarke
