Painting: The Man Who Left Home

It was as natural as two lumps in his cup of tea. The year was 1782, and there was Elkanah Watson, 24, a Massachusetts-born merchant visiting London with 100 guineas to burn. As he dined with the famous expatriate painter John Singleton Copley, Watson resolved to spend the money on a portrait of himself. Together they decided to include in the painting, as Watson wrote, “a ship, bearing to America the intelligence of the acknowledgment of Independence, with a sun just rising upon the stripes of the union, streaming from her gaff.”

Prudently, the artist waited until the royal proclamation of U.S. independence. Returning from the House of Lords where on Dec. 5, 1782 King George III recognized the freedom of his former colonies, Copley invited Watson to his studio. “There,” recalled Watson, “with a bold hand, a master’s touch, and I believe an American heart, he attached to the ship the stars and stripes. This was, I imagine, the first American flag hoisted in old England.”

The portrait (see color) is Copley at his finest hour. Commingled with the puritanical solidity of American realism are the extravagant fancies of Britain’s “Grand Manner”—sharply outlined bulks interrupted by thin, evanescent cuffs, ruffles and fluttery papers. The painting underlines the irony of Copley’s dilemma. As is documented by a current show * on the 150th anniversary of the artist’s death, he was the first great American painter, but his very quest for art destroyed that vision.

Frivolous & Sacrilegious. Brought up in the thrifty, strait-laced atmosphere of colonial Boston with its population of 18,000, Copley had no great art works to study. Art was held to be frivolous, even sacrilegious, except for sign painting and portrait limning. Complained Copley: “Was it not for preserving the resemblance of particular persons, painting would not be known in the place. The people generally regard it no more than any other useful trade.”

Forced to learn from local journeymen artists, Copley unwittingly developed a native vision. His metallic colors, hard lines and precise realism produced steely likenesses of such colonial worthies as Paul Revere, Samuel Adams, John Hancock. Learning by trial and error, he made his clients sit for as many as 900 hours while he perfected their portraits. Rates were strictly by size: “Whole lengths 40 guineas, half lengths 20, ¼ pieces or busts 10.”

Ten years before the Revolution, Sir Joshua Reynolds had seen Copley’s Boy with Squirrel in London, had it hung at the Society of Artists without knowing the painter’s correct name. Copley’s contemporary, Pennsylvania-born Benjamin West, living in London since 1763, urged him to visit Europe’s art treasures and learn to eliminate his too “liny” look. Not until the eve of the Revolution did Copley, accused of being a Tory sympathizer, dare risk ocean passage. He left behind him three houses and 20 acres on Beacon Hill. Copley never returned to America.

60,000 Paying Visitors. While making the Grand Tour, Copley discovered the glories of the High Renaissance and the Baroque. Settling in London, he tried to imitate the studied sophistication of European taste by loosening his brushwork and warming his colors. He executed more than 55 individual portraits for The Death of the Earl Chatham. For six years, he labored on an 18-ft. by 25-ft. canvas titled The Repulse of the Floating Batteries at Gibraltar; in 1791, 60,000 people paid to see it in an oriental tent set up near Buckingham Palace at the King’s invitation.

There was never an encore. Copley’s style became even more watery as he drew further away from the bedrock realism of his Boston background. But though he was tempted to return to the scenes of his youthful triumphs, he only admired America from afar, confidently predicted: “In 100 years the woods will be cleared, and art would then be encouraged there and great artists arrive.”

* Now at the National Gallery, the exhibition travels next to New York’s Metropolitan Museum and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.