Copley Exhibit Depicts Colorist's Long Career

Peter Pelham, a relatively unknown Boston mezzotint engraver and portrait painter, died in 1751, leaving his studio to his thirteen-year-old stepson. In the course of the next two years, that studio studio provided the nutriment for what became one of the richest and most vital careers in the history American painting. Pelham's stepson was John Singleton Copley, and his career is commemorated this year a major retrospective exhibition of his work. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Washington's National Gallery, and the Metropolitan Museum of New York have gathered 103 oils, pastels, minatures, and drawing (including seven works from Harvard) for a show that will be on display at the Museum of Fine Arts until March 6.

At the age of fifteen, Copley embarked on his artistic career with a mezzotint portrait of the Reverend William Welsteed, the recently deceased minister of Boston's New Brick Church. The similarity between this portrait and Peter Pelham's 1743 mezzotint of the Reverend Mr. William Cooper is more than a stylistic one. Copley actually took the original Pelham plate and altered the features to fit the new commission.

But Pelham's mezzotints also made an indelible mark on the style of Copley's original work. His first paintings are marked by flat planes and a strong linearity and by the broad, forceful highlights that eventually developed into the massive areas of bold color that served him so well in later years.

In the works of the first ten years we see a period of experimentation that gives us a clue to many of his later ambitions. His interest in historical themes, and in the extensive anatomical research (see below) that forms the groundwork for that genre, is clear in these works. But in America artists had to seek their bread and butter in portraiture, and Copley was forced to abandon his ambitions as a painter of history until his emigration to England in 1774.

In 1755 a skillful rococo colorist named Joseph Blackburn arrived from England. He immediately became an established painter in Boston and his work had a profound influence on Copley's portraiture. Blackburn's colors were light and gentle but the elegance of Blackburn's style drew out of Copley the sensitivity as a colorist which characterizes all of his later work. Though Blackburn had a great influence on Copley, Copley's individuality as a painter was never obscured; the characteristic sharp contrasts of light and dark (chiarascuro effects), the bold, saturated colors, and the free, heavy impasto (paint thickness) persist throughout most of his career.

The attention to symbolism begins in Copley's earliest paintings. His portrait of the Harvard astronomer Winthrop has a telescope on the backdrop, just as the portrait of Nicholas Boylston (of which there are three nearly identical copies) depicts the wealthy Boston merchant leaning on a ledger. The tradition is not new; through much of the eighteenth century many artists possessed handbooks, like Alciati's Ripe (1635), which encyclopedically portrayed all the traditional symbols and gestures in art associated with important didactic themes like virtue or temperance. In most of Copley's work the symbolic paraphernalia, like the background materials, is executed in a style that strongly contrasts it with the foreground subjects. In the portraits, the sitter is usually set off against a hazy stage-prop background that contradicts, in its two-dimensionality, the fullness and solidity of the foreground forms. Generally speaking, the quality of Copley's portraits varies inversely with the amount of paraphernalia and background cluttering.

The discrepancy in style and quality of representation between subject and quality of representation between subject and subordinate material is certainly no accident. It is intended to emphasize the important areas in the composition by contrast; but in fact, it only creates a distraction. By abandoning all these props, the painting of Mrs. Humphrey Devereux becomes one of Copley's most searching and effective portraits.

In the period from about 1763 to 1767 Copley developed a heavier impasto and a freer abbreviated brush stroke which is highly reminiscent of the late portraiture of Frans Hals. By 1765, Copley finally had his technique under control; his work became more straightforward and simple as if clearing away the unnecessary baggage in preparation for a new excursion.

In 1765 Copley painted a portrait of his step-brother Henry Pelham and sent it to the Society of Artists in London. Such leading artists as Joshua Reynolds and the American ex-patriate Benjamin West saw the work and extravagantly praised it, but both men criticized Copley's flat areas of isolated color and Reynolds objected further to the colors' harshness.

In response to the criticism of Reynolds and West, Copley began to put the finishing touches on his expertise as a craftsman. He learned to use colors to harmonize and unify his compositions and he made them responsive to each other instead of isolating them in the composition. He also abandoned much of the sharp contrast of color that earmarked his earlier work and he emerged with a more Rembrandtesque palette. His chiarascuro in this period intensified and his brush stroke became more exhuberant, bringing him into a closer affinity with the baroque Dutch masters. One of the most striking developments that emerged at this time was the perceptual depth of his painting. In works like Mrs. Humphrey Devereux he concentrated greater depths of psychological perception and achieved a more organic flesh color and texture than ever before. Copley treated the flesh of earlier portraits with more artificial coloring which usually was either pallid or green. In the aggregate, the works of this period represent a more confident individual style that stands above the standard formula for portraits.

In the years immediately before the Revolution, life in the colonies became increasingly turbulent and for Copley politics and art just didn't mix. Finally, on June 10, 1774, Copley set sail for England and though he was reluctant to give up the security of his established position, his not only an escape from the political tension but also the opportunity to pursue his desire for a career in history painting.

The paintings from Copley's early years in England are perhaps his best. Building on the skill that emerged during his last years in America, his brush became even freer, the paint more heavily modelled, and the stroke stronger and more concise. In the beginning he occupied himself as a portraitist to support his family and get himself established. But soon he had an opportunity to embark on a career as a painter of historical scenes when he was commissioned to paint well known Watson an the Shark. That work was followed by the Death of the Earl of Chatham in 1779 which enjoyed great critical plaudits. By 1780 Copley was at the height of his powers, as we can see in the oil sketch Mrs. Startin (see page 3).

Withdrew After Failure

The Three Princesses (1785) foreshadows a decline which was to commence in the next ten years. The picture is an effort in the grand style of the rococo painters. The ornamental detail dominates the picture and the subjects are lost. Furthermore, the figures are treated with a schematized shorthand that fits into a monumental scheme and robs them of their individual humanity. This propensity for slipping into an abbreviation of of human qualities recurs. The expression of the victim's face, in Watson and the Shark, is unconvincing as an expression of terror. Instead, it is a stony, symbolic expression that dehumanizes much of the experience.

After the failure of the Three Princesses Copley withdrew again into historical themes. The mammoth