Volume 42, Number 20 · December 21, 1995
An Honest Eye
By John Updike
John Singleton Copley in America 26, 1995–January 7, 1996.
an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, September, Catalog of the exhibition by Carrie Rebora, by Paul Staiti, by Erica E. Hirshler, by Theodore E. Stebbins Jr., by Carol Troyen, with contributions by Morrison H. Heckscher, by Aileen Ribeiro, by Marjorie Shelley
Metropolitan Museum of Art/Abrams, 348 pp., $65.00, $45.00 (paper)
John Singleton Copley in England 1995–January 7, 1996.
an exhibition at the National Gallery, Washington, DC, October 11,, Catalog of the exhibition by Emily Ballew Neff, with an essay by William L. Pressly
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston/Merrell Holberton, London, 182 pp., $50.00, $30.00 (paper)
An art-lover peripatetic enough to journey from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art to the National Gallery in Washington can survey, in one day, the two sides of John Singleton Copley: the American and the English. Copley, born in 1738 of humble Irish parents on Boston's Long Wharf, achieved rapid prosperity as the Bay Colony's preeminent portraitist, rendering, with a precocious and assiduous skill, the local merchants and landowners and their wives in settings and poses flatteringly suggestive of the English aristocracy. He married, as part of his assimilation into the New England upper classes, Susanna Farnham Clarke, whose father, Richard, was the wealthy, anglophilic Boston agent for the British East India Company. It was, in large part, Clarke's tea that was famously dumped, in November of 1773, into the harbor, by revolutionaries painted up as Mohawk Indians.
Review, 4250 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |