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John Singleton Copley unexpectedly illuminated America’s colonial sky. The child of poor uncultured parents and only briefly the stepson of artist Peter Pelham, he became by 1760, as if by Providence, the colonies’ supreme artist, a position he retained until his departure for London in 1774.
When Copley met Joseph Blackburn in 1755 he was inspired by Blackburns’ use of rococo lightness and coloring. Copley’s portrait of Paul Revere, which now lives in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is an example of his use of rococo and chiaroscuro styling.
More than two centuries after he painted it, Copley’s Paul Revere, which depicts the silversmith in shirtsleeves holding a luminous teapot, remains one of our most familiar images of...
According to art historian Paul Staiti, Copley was the greatest and most influential painter in colonial America, producing about 350 works of art. With his startling likenesses of persons and things, he came to define a realist art tradition in America.
The Copley Family shows the six members of the artist’s clan as it existed at the beginning of 1777. Copley has shown three adults—the artist, his wife, and her father—and his four children.
Sep 5, 2024 · John Singleton Copley (born July 3, 1738, Boston, Massachusetts [U.S.]—died September 9, 1815, London, England) was an American painter of portraits and historical subjects, generally acclaimed as the finest artist of colonial America.