Art: Rebel Brush

Wealthy Bostonians have invariably been kind to painters who were kind to them. In colonial days, each year brought a new crop of self-made gentry who wanted pictures of themselves in lace and ruffles to send home to England or to hang in their own parlors as proof of success. They cared more for the lace than for the likeness. Portraiture, wrote James Thomas Flexner in a history of colonial painting (First Flowers of Our Wilderness, Houghton Mifflin; $10) out last week, became “a profession before any other American art.”

Inevitably, the chief hero of Flexner’s book is Boston’s John Singleton Copley, who made an art out of the craft. His stepfather died in 1751, and Copley at 13 had somehow to support his mother and infant halfbrother. Though portraiture was built on stylistic tricks and flattering poses of which he knew nothing, young Copley decided that it was the job for him.

To start with, says Flexner, “he read the few books about art available to him, with all the concentration of a virgin deep in tales of love.” The books were not much help, so Copley went counter to the conventions and painted as photographically as he knew how. Gradually he evolved a useful and straightforward theory of his own; he concluded that his paintings were “almost always good in proportion to the time I give them, provided I have a subject that is picturesque.”

Copley painted Paul Revere sitting in shirtsleeves at a workbench, but he would never have portrayed a common stevedore. He married into society, and the Boston Tea Party came as a shock and a bother. In 1774, Copley sailed out of trouble to England, leaving behind a harshly energetic and thoroughly credible portrait gallery of such political rebels as Samuel Adams and Thomas Mifflin.