Nicholas Boylston (1716-1771)

1753–1774 · Workplace

Boston

June 1771 – January 1772

A trip to New York: thirty-seven portraits

At the invitation of Myles Cooper, president of King’s College, whose portrait Copley had painted in Boston in 1768, he sets up his easel on Broadway in New York and paints thirty-seven portraits. It is his only American tour away from Boston: most of the Southern portraits attributed to him were in fact made by Henry Benbridge.

1773

His father-in-law is consignee of the Boston Tea Party tea

Richard Clarke, the artist’s father-in-law, was the merchant to whom the tea that provoked the Boston Tea Party was consigned. All of Copley’s family connections were Loyalists, and at a meeting described in his letter of 1 December 1773 he defended his wife’s relatives.

April 1774

A mob at Copley’s house looks for the Loyalist Watson

A mob comes to Copley’s house demanding Col. George Watson, a Loyalist mandamus counsellor who had gone elsewhere; the patriots threaten to have Copley’s blood if he ever again shelters such a villain. In a letter of 26 April he is appalled: had Watson stayed the night, as he had pressed him to, he would have had to give up a friend to the insult of a mob or have his house pulled down and perhaps his family murdered.

June 1774

Sails from Boston for London

Amid growing unrest on the eve of the War of Independence, and urged on by correspondents in England, Copley sails with many letters of introduction, leaving his mother, wife and children in Henry Pelham’s charge. He never returns to America.

1774–1815 · Workplace

London