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Essentially self-taught, John Singleton Copley became the leading portrait painter in the colonies before moving to England in 1774. He painted miniatures between 1755 and 1770, creating roughly thirty oil-on-copper images and fifteen paintings in watercolor on ivory.
John Singleton Copley was born in Boston in 1738, and grew up there, training in the visual arts under his step-father Peter Pelham (c. 1697-1751), an English engraver who had immigrated in 1727 and married Copley's widowed mother in 1748. Copley's earliest paintings, from the mid-1750s, reveal the influence of English mezzotint portraits as ...
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.
John Singleton Copley (American, 1738-1815) Overview. John Singleton Copley, the foremost artist in colonial America, was virtually self-taught as a portraitist. By meticulously recording details, he created powerful characterizations of his Boston sitters.
Overview. Provenance. Title: The Return of Neptune. Artist: John Singleton Copley (American, Boston, Massachusetts 1738–1815 London) Date: ca. 1754. Culture: American. Medium: Oil on canvas. Dimensions: 27 1/2 x 44 1/2 in. (69.9 x 113 cm) Credit Line: Gift of Mrs. Orme Wilson, in memory of her parents, Mr. and Mrs. J. Nelson Borland, 1959.
Prints and Drawings ; Show Only On view ; Public domain ; Recent acquisition ... John Singleton Copley; Daniel Hubbard, 1764 John Singleton Copley; Henry Hill, c. 1765–70 John Singleton Copley; Robert Hyde, Squire of Hyde, 1778 John Singleton Copley; Joseph Gerrish, 1770 John Singleton Copley; Mrs. Henry Hill (Anna Barrett), c. 1765–70 John ...
John Singleton Copley’s dramatic painting Watson and the Shark (1778) depicts a shark attacking 14-year-old Brook Watson. The work caused a sensation when it was exhibited at London’s Royal Academy in 1778.
