The Paintings of John Singleton Copley a Special Exhibition
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The Paintings of John Singleton Copley A special exhibition The Paintings of John Singleton Copley PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST Copley probably painted this portrait of himself soon after he left America. Diam. 18 inches Painted about 1776 (?) Lent by Mrs. Gardiner Greene Hammond <AN EXHIBITION OF Paintings By John Singleton Copley In Commemoration of the TWO-HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY Of HIS BIRTH Held in THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART V^(eW York DECEMBER 22, I 936 TO FEBRUARY 14, I 937 COPYRIGHT BY THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART DECEMBER, I 936 List 0^ LENDERS His Majesty King Edward VIII, from the royal collection, Buckingham Palace City of Boston Bowdoin College Museum of Fine Arts Brooklyn Museum City Art Museum of St. Louis Cleveland Museum of Art Columbia University Concord Art Association Foundling Hospital, London Harvard University The Historical Society of Pennsylvania Museum of Fine Arts, Boston National Portrait Gallery, London The New York Public Library Social Law Library, Boston Tate Gallery, London Corporation of Trinity Church, New York Wadsworth Atheneum Worcester Art Museum Anonymous Lender Anonymous Lender The Right Honourable, The Viscount Barrington The Right Honourable, The Lord Brabourne Theodore Parkman Carter Mrs. Richard H. Dana, Jr. George McClellan Derby Mrs. Gardiner Greene Hammond Henderson Inches Theodore J. Knapp Mrs. Oswald W. Knauth Miss Alida Livingston Mrs. Luke Vincent Lockwood Frank Lyman Mrs. William A. Putnam Miss Mary Rogers Roper Ronald Tree The Misses Wetmore PREFACE THAT THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART should give an exhibition of the work of John Singleton Copley needs no explanation, for Copley was the outstanding portrait painter of the colonies in the decades pre ceding the Revolution, and when he went to London he soon made for himself a very enviable position among the artists of the English school. If any ex planation is required, it would be of the choice of the year 1937 as the occasion for commemorating him, and that explanation is given by Mr. Wehle on pages 1 f. below, and by Mrs. Burroughs in the December number of the Museum's Bulletin on pages 2521". Success came to Copley at a very early age. In his teens he was already receiving commissions, and for the next twenty years he devoted himself to painting with remarkable industry. Scores of prominent and well-to-do colonists sat for him, and institutions and private families throughout America still prize his works. It is through the generosity of these institu tions and families that we are able to bring together a brilliant exhibition of his earlier paintings. While many of these latter are familiar to Ameri cans, few in this country are so well acquainted with what he did after he settled in London, and the pres ence of extremely important paintings of his English period in this exhibition makes it a truly unusual event. The Museum is, therefore, under great obliga tion to the generous response shown in England to P R E FAC E the requests for loans made on its behalf by Mr. Wehle and Mr. Greenway. Particularly are we in debted to His Majesty King Edward VIII for the brilliant portrait from the royal collection, Bucking ham Palace; to the Tate Gallery for its own Death of Major Pierson as well as for the Death of the Earl of Chatham which has long hung in the House of Lords; and to the National Portrait Gallery for the Earl of Mansfield—loans of an official character which give to the exhibition an unusual importance. H. E. WINLOCK. JOHN SINGLETON COPLEY JOHN SINGLETON COPLEY 1 o CELEBRATE the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of John Singleton Copley is to do Thonor to the most vital and original talent in the course of early American painting. Gilbert Stuart was to learn to paint in London and to bring home to America an urbane, full-fledged style based on the British. Copley, on the other hand, developed an in digenous species of art in Boston and there practiced for some fifteen years as the leading portrait painter before he removed to London,where at last he adapted his style to current English expression. Despite our considerable knowledge about Copley's life it is difficult to determine just what instruction and what examples he had recourse to in Boston, what factors outside of himself most influenced his style, and to what extent the provinciality and Puri tanism of the environment confined his development. There is reason enough to accept his complaint of 'Until the publication in 1914 of the Letters and Papers of John Singleton Copley and Henry Pelham, /73Q-/766, the year 1737 had usually been accepted as the date of Copley's birth. Allan Cunningham in his Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters and Sculptors (1830-1833) published the first biography of Copley, giving the date of birth as July 3, 1737. The month and day as stated were later proved correct by a letter of Copley's widow published in Martha Babcock Amory's biography of Copley (p. 226). Doubt was thrown upon the year 1737, however, by Copley's own letter of September 12, 1766 (Copley-Pelham Letters, p. 48) in which he refers to the ambitions which have given him "resolution anough to live a batchelor to the age of 4 JOHN SINGLETON COPLEY ity. A portrait (1757) of Mrs. Daniel Rae and infant daughter points to Smibert, while Blackburn's in fluence is evident in portraits of Mrs. Samuel Liver- more, Ann Tyng Smelt, and William Brattle, all dated 1756.6 But Copley's ambition hurdled his Boston col leagues almost unconsciously, carrying his inquiries at once to the greatest masters, whose works he longed to see in the galleries of Europe. When, years later, he reached London, his letters spoke not of the fashion able British portraits but of Rubens's great ceiling at Whitehall Palace, and in Paris and Rome it was again the works of Rubens and of Van Dyck, Poussin, Cor- reggio, and Raphael that he analyzed and described for the instruction of his young half brother, Henry Pelham. Besides the limited achievements of his seniors in the profession, Copley knew some prints imported for sale by old Peter Pelham and by Stephen Greenleaf. Among these were engravings after the Raphael tap estry cartoons. There were copies to be seen also—a Van Dyck head at Mrs. Hancock's and a Pan and Syrinx (after Rubens presumably) at Mr.Chardon's.6 Young Henry Pelham owned an unidentified paint ing of Diana and a John the Baptist copied by Smibert from a Holy Family by Titian. There were several other copies by Smibert—after the portrait of Bentivoglio by Van Dyck, after Poussin's Continence 5The present exhibition is designed rather to illustrate Copley's achievement than to record his total development, and the grop ing early works as well as the late catastrophies have been purposely excluded. '•Copley-Pelham Letters, pp. 250 f. JOHN SINGLETON COPLEY 5 of Scipio, after a Venus and Cupid by Titian and a Holy Family by Raphael. But when Copley actually saw Raphael's works in Rome he realized that the monotonous olive tone and bricky red faces which marred Smibert's copies were very different indeed from the originals.' Probably Copley was familiar also with reproduc tions of seventeenth-century portraits. Occasional pompous gestures, as in his portrait of Samuel Adams, suggest Rigaud and Largilliere, and so does his general tendency to baroque opulence of stuffs. His fondness for showing his male sitters in the in formality of banians and caps finds a parallel in Hogarth, and his charming three-quarter-length la dies delicately engaged with flowers or what not are antedated by some of Reynolds's early portraits. But these could only have been known through engrav ings, and Copley was forced to invent his own color, which has an individual quality, cool and metallic. Quite his own also is the startling combination of sump tuous stuffs with the informal poses and surprisingly personal peculiarities of his sitters. By its intimate characterization and delicate interplay of personali ties as well as by its purely aesthetic qualities the portrait of Thomas Mifflin and his wife (no. 33) gives us the keenest pleasure. It was painted in 1773, two years after Copley's New York visit, at which time the artist had seen at Governor Allen's in Philadelphia a copy after Titian's Concert8 with its subtle rela tion between the musicians. The classic draughts- Ubid., p. 304. Hbid., p. 341 .The painting is sometimes attributed to Giorgione. 6 JOHN SINGLETON COPLEY manship was inspired perhaps by prints after Raphael. In Rome later on Copley finds that Raphael "has studyed the life very carefully, his Transfiguration, after he had got the composition of it on the Canvis, he has painted with the same attention that I painted Mr. Mifflins portrait and his Ladys. in that deter mined manner he has painted all the heads, hands, feet, Draperys, and background, with a plain simple body of Colours and great precision in his out line, and all parts of it from nature."9 Copley's development during the crucial years fol lowing his early derivative period is difficult to follow because of a lack of dated portraits. The forthright picture of the bookseller Daniel Henchman (no. i) marks the progress of those years. It has the look of a portrait from life, and Henchman died in 1761. The drawing is immensely in advance of the works dated four and five years earlier. Copley's stimulating sense of character is suddenly evident, as are also his clear outline and firm modeling.