Copley, John Singleton (redirected from Copley)

Copley, John Singleton, British jurist

Copley, John Singleton, 1772–1863, British jurist: see Lyndhurst, John Singleton Copley, Baron.

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Copley, John Singleton, American portrait painter

Copley, John Singleton (kŏp`lē), 1738–1815, American portrait painter, b. Boston. Copley is considered the greatest of the American old masters. He studied with his stepfather, Peter Pelham, and undoubtedly frequented the studios of Smibert and Feke. At 20 he was already a successful portrait painter with a mature style remarkable for its brilliance, clarity, and forthright characterization. In 1766 his Boy with the Squirrel was exhibited in London and won the admiration of Benjamin West, who urged him to come to England. However, he remained in America for eight years longer and worked in New York City and Philadelphia as well as in Boston.

In 1774 Copley visited Italy and then settled in London, where he spent the remainder of his life, enjoying many honors and the patronage of a distinguished clientele. In England his style gained in subtlety and polish but lost most of the vigor and individuality of his early work. He continued to paint portraits but enlarged his repertoire to include the enormous historical paintings that constituted the chief basis of his fame abroad. His large historical painting The Death of Lord Chatham (Tate Gall., London) gained him admittance to the Royal Academy. His rendering of a contemporary disaster, Brook Watson and the Shark (Mus. of Fine Arts, Boston), stands as a unique forerunner of romantic horror painting.

Today Copley's reputation rests largely upon his early American portraits, which are treasured not only for their splendid pictorial qualities but also as the most powerful graphic record of their time and place. Portraits such as those of Nicholas Boylston and Mrs. Thomas Boylston (Harvard), Daniel Hubbard (Art Inst., Chicago), Governor Mifflin and Mrs. Mifflin (Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia), and Paul Revere (Mus. of Fine Arts, Boston) are priceless documents in which the life of a whole society seems mirrored. Among his finest later portraits are the curiously distorted image of Samuel Adams (Mus. of Fine Arts, Boston) and the group portrait of the Copley family (privately owned). The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has an excellent collection of his works. Copley's son was Baron Lyndhurst.

Bibliography

See catalog with biography by J. D. Prown (1966); biographies by J. T. Flexner (rev. ed. 1948) and A. V. Frankenstein (1970); John Singleton Copley in America (1995) by C. Rebora, P. Staiti, T. E. Stebbins, Jr., and E. E. Hirshler.

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Copley, John Singleton

(born July 3, 1738, Boston, Mass.—died Sept. 9, 1815, London, Eng.) U.S. painter of portraits and historical subjects. The stepson of an engraver, he was an accomplished draftsman before age 20 and flourished as a portrait artist in his native Boston. He was famous for his portraits d'apparat, portrayals of his subjects with the objects associated with them in their daily lives or professions. In 1775 he settled in London and turned to the more fashionable history painting; he was elected to the Royal Academy in 1779. He revealed a gift for portraying heroic action in multifigure compositions. He is considered the greatest U.S. painter of the 18th century and the finest artist of the colonial era.

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Copley, John Singleton (1738–1815) painter; born in Boston, Mass. (stepson of Peter Pelham). Considered the foremost portrait painter in colonial America, he settled in England (1775) at the urging of Sir Joshua Reynolds and Benjamin West. Although his family was Loyalist, he himself remained neutral during the American Revolution. He was successful in England, as seen in his historical subjects, such as Death of Major Peirson (1782–84). His reputation is based on his early American work, as in Boy with Squirrel (1765), a portrait of his half brother, Henry Pelham. Watson and the Shark (1778) is his most famous narrative painting.

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Copley, John Singleton 

Born July 3, 1738, in Boston; died Sept. 9, 1815, in London. American painter.

After 1774, Copley lived primarily in London, where he became a member of the Academy of Arts in 1799. He painted realist portraits, sometimes in pastels, which are distinguished by a sincere and fresh realistic approach (Nathaniel Ward, 1765–70, Art Museum, Cleveland; The Boy With a Squirrel c. 1765, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). Among Copley’s historical paintings, which reflect a tendency toward purely external effects, his pictures with preromantic elements are particularly noteworthy (Brook Watson and the Shark, 1782, Boston Museum of Fine Arts).

REFERENCE

Prown, J. D. J. S. Copley, vols. 1–2. Cambridge (Mass.), 1966.