A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley by Jane Kamensky

Author:Jane Kamensky [Kamensky, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2016-10-04T04:00:00+00:00

Copley, BENJAMIN WEST, ca. 1776–80 [Plate 12]

Copley, SELF-PORTRAIT, ca. 1780–84 [Plate 13]

By the time Copley painted him, London newspapers regularly cast Benjamin West as an English artist. “To B. West, Esq., Historical Painter to his Majesty,” one critic, who styled himself Divine Patriotism, addressed an open letter in the Morning Chronicle. He heralded West as a leaders among the field of brilliants whose work demonstrated that “the genius of painting, under the royal favour, has reared his standard in Britain,” and who thus richly deserved “every national encouragement.”74 Copley, too, wanted to be a British painter. But despite his Leicester Square address, and his Anglo-Irish middle name, America remained his context and his contest.

After Harry Pelham joined the Copley household in London, leaving his mother to her fate, he advertised a subscription to support the engraving of a large-scale map of Boston and its environs, “an actual survey,” he said, “taken at a Time when his Loyalty had rendered him totally idle.” The map, which Generals Gage and William Howe had endorsed, showed the numerous “Military Works” constructed around Boston, a place expected to be “the Seat of War for some Time to come.” People who wanted to purchase a copy were invited to sign up at a number of places around London, Copley’s house among them. When the large-scale map was ready, those who shelled out eight shillings might see the painter’s name engraved onto the landscape of battle: COPLEY’S HILL, just below the powder magazine.75

Harry had come to see the imperial conflict as a kind of hysteria, its flames fanned by self-interested men who put their own “unbounded Ambition” and a “lust of Power and Dominion” before the welfare of a “once happy but now too fatally deluded and distressed People.”76 He and Clarke and the other Boston émigrés could not shake the pain of their forced removal. Copley insisted on a different story: he was pulled by art, not pushed by politics. In a petition seeking to retain her son’s Boston lands while other absent loyalists were declared “inimical” and had their property seized by the new state of Massachusetts, Mary Pelham told the General Court that Copley had been “for Some years meditating a Voyage to Europe to perfect himself in the Business of his Profession, Portraiture, and in May 1774, some short Time before the Port Bill” took effect, he had sailed, leaving “so long before the Rupture as that he could not foresee that it would take Place.” This was both true and false. As Copley’s mother surely knew, he had departed not in May but in June, some short time after the Port Bill took effect. But her story nonetheless mirrored the one Copley told his whole life long, to anyone who would listen: that he found himself “accidentally in England,” there to “make further Improvement by Practice.” That he had left Massachusetts “purely upon his private Business,” without rancor for America, “having never directly or indirectly taken Part with the Enemies” of the patriots’ cause.

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