John Singleton Copley: American Painter in European Art

Colonial Boston and the World That Shaped Copley

One of the foremost painters of his generation, the American John Singleton Copley brought the experiences of the New World to the traditions of European art. Born in Boston in 1738, Copley grew up in a world that, in his words, regarded painting as "no more than any other useful trade, as they sometimes term it, like that of a Carpenter tailor, or shew maker, not as one of the most noble Arts in the World."

The American colonies were provincial adjuncts of the British Empire. Massachusetts, like most of the Northern colonies, was commercial in outlook. Boston was a growing center of trade and small crafts, but not much more. Art and artistry were still thought of as something alien to the rough-and-ready world that was still being carved out of the pristine wilderness. The Puritan ethos dominated. The principles of hard work, simplicity, and frugality were more characteristic of the culture than creativity for its own sake or an understanding of art as a necessary prerequisite to the pursuit of a higher civilization.

Painting, such as it existed in Copley's Boston, was intimately linked to general attitudes toward wealth and status. According to the Puritan view, one's material success served as a signpost of one's spiritual well-being; the more one was favored by God, the greater would be one's material success and all of its outward manifestations. To this end, painting was seen primarily as the art of portraiture — a cataloging of the relative worth of an individual or individuals. Copley would encounter a considerable amount of portrait art in Boston, though not always of the highest quality. What there was of true "fine art" would be found in the form of engravings in the homes of the wealthy and prominent.

The Limner Tradition and Early European Influences

As a result, the highly talented youngster was forced to fall back on his own devices, studying the copies of European art that came his way and attempting to make sense of the limner tradition that then represented the American colonial version of high art. Not true folk painting, which is unchanging, the limners who had dominated American portraiture since the earliest days of the colonies were actually attempting — without any formal training — to copy the styles and techniques they saw reproduced in the European engravings with which Copley was familiar:

The limner, as an untrained artist, presented reality conceptually, as idea, and pinned it down with two-dimensional surface patterns characterized by linear boundedness and equal emphasis of parts… though generically primitive, was essentially archaic, having within it the potential for change and development.

And so too did Copley, who quickly developed his own interpretation of the limner style fused with his attempts to copy the techniques of formally trained European masters. What Copley learned from the limners' painstaking attempts at delineating the sheen and texture of rich draperies, and their almost microscopic attention to every detail of costume and setting, was the connection between these elements and the mercantile ethos of the land of his birth. From an early date, Copley was interpreting the techniques of European painting within the context of New England life and society.

Works Cited

Bell, Judith. "Artist Outgrew His Homeland but Wasn't the Same Abroad." Insight on the News 12 June 1995: 32+.

Flexner, James Thomas. Random Harvest. Bronx, NY: University Press, 1998.

Novak, Barbara. American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience. 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Icon Editions, 1979.

Preston, Todd. "Moby-Dick and John Singleton Copley's Watson and the Shark." Melville Society Extracts July 2005: 1+.

Rather, Susan. "Carpenter, Tailor, Shoemaker, Artist: Copley and Portrait Painting around 1770." The Art Bulletin 79.2 (1997): 269+.