Copley Bicentennial

Boston Brahmins have never been able to decide whether their most famed painter was born in 1737 or 1738. Last week the Metropolitan Museum of Art cut the knot, arbitrarily picked the first date and gave as a bicentennial exhibition the largest showing of the works of John Singleton Copley the U. S. has ever seen. Forty-seven pictures were on view, borrowed from such diverse sources as Buckingham Palace, the St. Louis Art Museum, Harvard University, Lord Brabourne, the London Foundling Hospital, Hartford's Atheneum, and a Mr. Henderson Inches. The Metropolitan's Copley show traced the artist's development from his stiff but forthright colonial portraits of the 1760s to the slick and unctuous set pieces produced by the Tory expatriate about 1800.

In his long, successful career, Artist Copley never lacked money. Born when Boston was the most prosperous city in North America, his childish bent for drawing was encouraged by his stepfather, Schoolmaster Peter Pelham, whose shingle advertised: "Reading, Writing, Needlework, Dancing, and the Art of Painting upon Glass." Peter Pelham was also a mezzotint engraver of real ability, made able portraits of Cotton Mather and the rest of Boston's thundering divines. Young John Copley worked with him, was welcomed in Boston's best houses. At the age of 16 he was already known as a skillful portraitist, in 1755 painted a miniature of redheaded Colonel Washington of Virginia, who was already known as a skillful Indian fighter.

Artist Copley married well, lived and worked in Boston until he was 36, entertaining the quality, living in a fine house with an eleven-acre farm on Beacon Hill. He had had quite a success with a portrait of his half-brother playing with a squirrel, which he had shipped to the London Society of Artists on the advice of his friend, Artist Benjamin West.* This, the first picture of John Singleton Copley to attract international attention, was back in the Metropolitan last week, lent by a heavily anonymous owner.

Artist Copley continued to ship pictures to London where they won great praise from Sir Joshua Reynolds and his group, but Copley did not move to London until 1774. In London his work lost the crude color and simple, direct line of his colonial period. On the other hand, Copley was able to indulge to the full his fondness for painting satins, velvets, rich laces. He began to compose grandiloquent historical scenes like The Siege of Gibraltar, The Death of Lord Chatham.

He never lost his irritating slowness at work. Flesh tones he mixed a gob at a time with his palette knife, scrupulously held the mixture up to his sitter's face before he put it on canvas. When he painted the three little daughters of George III playing in a garden, he was so slow and demanded so many sittings that the Princesses, their nursemaids, spaniels and a bright green parrot all broke into open revolt. Last week The Three Princesses was off its accustomed hook in Buckingham Palace and on the walls of the Manhattan Museum.

Most famed example of Artist Copley's slow pace is his large portrait of The Knatchbull Family. While years passed and Copley continued to peck at the canvas, Sir Edward Knatchbull's first and second wives died and he married a third, sired a tenth child. Undaunted, Artist Copley got Ladies Knatchbull I and II in the picture as angels in the sky, but later Sir Edward had them painted out. Out of fashion and in debt, Artist Copley died in 1815, twelve years before his son, John Singleton Jr., became Lord Chancellor of England.

*Artist West, Pennsylvania Quaker, was a year younger than John Copley, became the second president of Britain's Royal Academy. He was an American painter only by accident of birth, did no important work until he had left the Colonies for good, circa 1760.

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