Artist outgrew his homeland but wasn't the same abroad

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 12, 1995 | by Judith Bell

In 1766, an American sea captain brought Joshua Reynolds, the great English painter and president of the Royal Academy of Arts, a canvas he had ferried across the Atlantic. The painter, Reynolds was told, was 28 and had never been out of the provincial city of Boston. His name was John Singleton Copley and he wished to exhibit his work with the Society of Artists.

Reynolds stared at the portrait of a young boy leaning intently over a table where his pet flying squirrel, held by a delicate chain, nibbled at a nut. Never, he would later say, had he seen a picture that so affected him with its meticulous realism, its powerful directness. How, he asked, as did those who would see Copley's work after his election to the society, had such genius sprung up in the wilderness of America?

In the years preceding the American Revolution, Copley was America's greatest and most successful painter. He shared with the Van Dycks and the Caravaggios of the world a rare ability to apprehend the hidden core of an object, to render an apple or its reflection as more real than real, with clarity and sincerity that moved the naive as well as the educated. Prior to leaving for England in 1774, where he was to remain, seduced by the Furopean tradition of academic painting, Copley painted some of America's greatest portraits. Whigs and Tories alike sat for him, including patriots Paul Revere, John Hancock and Nathaniel Hurd. From the landed gentry to the emerging merchant class, everyone who was anyone wanted Copley to paint them.

"John Singleton Copley in America," an exhibition organized jointly by Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, opens this month in Boston and features more than 50 such portraits. In each one, the eyes over which Copley labored so long to capture perfectly and truthfully, as he did with all aspects of a likeness, are windows revealing both the sitter's character and a particular moment in history.

Early American artists, cut off from the richness of Western art, gleaned what tradition they could from books or from the examination of the occasional engraving. Sometimes an artist from Europe would arrive seeking an environment in which the clientele was less demanding and the competition less fierce.

John Smibert, a minor Scottish portrait painter from London, established a monopoly on the Boston portrait business. In Smibert's studio, Copley may have seen copies of European masterpieces, including one of Van Dyck's portrait Cardinal Bentivolglio. Like distorted reflection, Smibert's copies and his own paintings of Boston socialites hinted at the possibility of richer portrait style.

As for those who wanted to be rendered in oil, colonial Americans were the individualists. Bold adventurers, they had risked everything to make their way in the new world and saw themselves as the founders of dynasties. Many wanted their descendants to know their faces: Portraits were consigned by the thousands. In a town left utterly bereft of substantial painting talent with the passing of Smibert, Copley quickly became the colonies' most sought-after painter - making his debut at age 15.

Like American artists before him, Copley struggled to render light, texture, color and line - having no great masters to guide him. Using engravings as his reference point, he cluttered his early canvases with imported detail, lap dogs, lush fabrics, pearls and other natural trappings of the British upper class.

When he painted reality, however, he did so with painstaking clarity. Forced to work out his own palette and brush stroke, two qualities lost in black-and-white engraving, Copley gave his figures and fabrics a solid presence. His tonal range, derived through much experimentation, settled finally into the cool colors - greens, tans, russets and grays - smoothly applied to large surfaces.

"Copley was part of a period of incredible artistic production in a variety of media," says Carol Troyen, associate curator of American paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts. "In Boston in the 1760s and 1770s, great pieces of furniture were made, great works of silver, great domestic architecture." Copley, however, was aware that his clientele regarded creations in all of these media as means to advertise their sophistication and wealth. "His portraits were often the creation of an image that his clientele desired," Troyen says. But like most portrait painters, "he got tired of it and aspired to more, which he knew about through his correspondence with European artists."

Copley had a strong sense of his abilities, yet he hesitated to risk his comfortable lifestyle. Having come from humble circumstances, he internalized the values of the city's merchant elite. Only with the coming of the American Revolution, when it became clear he wouldn't be able to maintain his standard of living, did he leave for Europe.

After viewing Titian's works during a subsequent grand tour of Europe, Copley wrote of his disappointment. "Titiano is no ways minute, but sacrifices all the small parts to the General Effect." Ironically, the same can be said of Copley himself. While he went on to excel at the European academic style, his sacrifice of "the small parts to the General Effect" is a loss rightfully mourned anew in viewing the latest exhibition of his American portraits, which will visit New York and Houston after Boston. Another exhibition, "John Singleton Copley in England," examining the second half of his career, will open at Washington's National Gallery of Art this fall before joining the first show in Houston.