The Postcard
A postally unused postcard that was published by the New York Public Library, 476, 5th. Avenue, NYC. The card has a divided back.
John Singleton Copley
John Singleton Copley RA, who was born on the 3rd. July 1738, was an Anglo-American painter, active in both colonial America and in England. He was probably born in Boston, Massachusetts, to Richard and Mary Singleton Copley, both Anglo-Irish.
After becoming well-established as a portrait painter of the wealthy in colonial New England, he moved to London in 1774, never returning to America. In London, he met considerable success as a portraitist for the next two decades, and also painted a number of large history paintings, which were innovative in their readiness to depict modern subjects and modern dress. His later years were less successful, and John died heavily in debt.
John Singleton Copley – The Early Years
Copley’s mother owned a tobacco shop on Long Wharf in Boston, Mass. According to the artist’s granddaughter Martha Babcock Amory, they had come to Boston in 1736:
"They were engaged in trade, like almost
all the inhabitants of the North American
colonies at that time".
John’s father was from Limerick; his mother, of the Singletons of County Clare, a family of Lancashire origin. Richard Copley, described as a tobacconist, arrived in Boston in ill health and moved, about the time of John’s birth, to the West Indies, where he died.
William H. Whitmore gives Richard’s death as of 1748, the year of Mrs. Copley’s re-marriage.
Except for a family tradition that speaks of his precocity in drawing, nothing is known of Copley’s schooling or of the other activities of his boyhood. His letters, the earliest of which is dated 30th. September 1762, reveal a fairly well-educated man.
John may have been taught various subjects by his future stepfather, who, besides painting portraits and cutting engravings, eked out a living in Boston by teaching dancing. Beginning on the 12th. September 1743, he also conducted an ‘Evening Writing and Arithmetic School’, duly advertised.
The widow Copley married Peter Pelham on the 22nd. May 1748, and at about that time she transferred her tobacco business to his house in Lindall Street (a quieter, more respectable part of town), at which the evening school also continued its sessions.
In such a household young Copley probably learned to use a paintbrush and engraver’s tools. Whitmore says:
"Copley at the age of fifteen was able
to engrave in mezzotint; his stepfather
Pelham, with whom he lived for three
years, was an excellent engraver and
skilful also with the brush."
The family lived next to the house occupied by japanner Thomas Johnston and his family, and Copley became friends with Thomas’s son William, later to become a painter himself.
The artistic opportunities of the home and town in which Copley grew up should be emphasised, because he made much of the bleakness of his early surroundings. His son, Lord Lyndhurst, wrote that:
"He was entirely self taught, and never
saw a decent picture, with the exception
of his own, until he was nearly thirty
years of age."
Copley himself complained, in a letter to Benjamin West, written on the 12th. November 1766:
"In this Country as you rightly observe
there is no examples of Art, except what
is to be met with in a few prints indifferently
exicuted, from which it is not possable to
learn much."
Variants of this thesis are found almost everywhere in his earlier letters. They suggest that, while Copley was industrious and able artist, he was physically unadventurous, and temperamentally inclined toward brooding and self-pity.
He could have seen at least a few good paintings and many good prints in the Boston of his youth. The excellence of his own portraits was not accidental or miraculous; it had an academic foundation.
A book of Copley’s studies of the figure, now in the British Museum, proves that before he was twenty, whether with or without help from a teacher, he was making anatomical drawings with much care and precision.
It is likely that through the fortunate associations of a home and workshop in a town which had many craftsmen, he had already learned his trade at an age when the average art student of a later era was only just beginning to draw.
John Singleton Copley’s Rising Reputation
Copley was about fourteen and his stepfather had recently died, when he made the earliest of his portraits now preserved, a likeness of his half-brother Charles Pelham. The portrait is good in colour and characterisation. It is a remarkable work to have come from so young a hand.
The artist was only fifteen when he painted the portrait of the Rev. William Welsteed, minister of the Brick Church in Long Lane, a work which, following Peter Pelham’s practice, Copley personally engraved to get the benefit from the sale of prints. No other engraving has been attributed to Copley.
A self-portrait, undated, depicting a boy of about seventeen wearing a broken straw hat, and a painting of Mars, Venus and Vulcan, signed and dated 1754, disclose crudities of execution which do not obscure the decorative intent and documentary value of the works.
Such painting would obviously advertise itself anywhere. Without going after business, for his letters do not indicate that he was ever aggressive or pushy, Copley started as a professional portrait-painter long before he was of age.
In October 1757, Capt. Thomas Ainslie, collector of the Port of Quebec, acknowledged from Halifax the receipt of his portrait, which "gives me great Satisfaction", and advised the artist to visit Nova Scotia:
"There are several people there
who would be glad to employ you."
This request to paint in Canada was later repeated from Quebec, with Copley replying:
"I should receive a singular pleasure in
excepting, if my Business was anyways
slack, but it is so far otherwise that I have
a large Room full of Pictures unfinished,
which would ingage me these twelve
months if I did not begin any others."
Besides painting portraits in oil, doubtless after a formula learned from Peter Pelham, Copley was a pioneer American pastellist. He wrote, on the 30th. September 1762, to the Swiss painter Jean-Étienne Liotard, asking him for "A sett of the best Swiss Crayons for drawing of Portraits."
The young American anticipated Liotard’s surprise "that so remote a corner of the Globe as New England should have any demand for the necessary eutensils for practiceing the fine Arts" by assuring him that:
"America which has been the seat of
war and desolation, I would fain hope
will one Day become the School of
fine Arts."
The requested pastels were duly received, and used by Copley in making many portraits in a medium suited to his talent. By this time he had begun to demonstrate his genius for rendering surface textures and capturing emotional immediacy.
Copley’s fame was established in England by the exhibition, in 1766, of ‘A Boy with a Flying Squirrel’, which depicted his half-brother, Henry Pelham, seated at a table and playing with a pet squirrel. This picture, made the young Boston painter a Fellow of the Society of Artists of Great Britain.
Copley’s letter of the 3rd. September 1765, to Capt. R. G. Bruce, reveals that it was taken to England as a personal favor in the luggage of Roger Hale, surveyor of the port of London. The painting, unaccompanied by name or letter of instructions, was delivered to Benjamin West, who is said to have exclaimed with a warmth and enthusiasm of which those who knew him best could scarcely believe him capable:
"What delicious colouring
worthy of Titian himself!"
The American squirrel disclosed the colonial origin of the picture. A letter from Copley was subsequently delivered to Benjamin West. West got the canvas into the Exhibition of the year and wrote, on the 4th. August 1766, a letter to Copley in which he referred to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s interest in the work and advised the artist to:
"Make a viset to Europe for this
porpase (of self-improvement)
for three or four years."
West’s subsequent letters were responsible for making Copley discontented with his situation and prospects in a colonial town. Copley in his letters to West in 1766 gleefully accepted the invitation to send other pictures to the Exhibition, and mournfully referred to himself as:
"Peculiarly unlucky in Liveing in a place
into which there has not been one portrait
brought that is worthy to be call’d a Picture
within my memory."
In a later letter to West, of the 17th. June 1768, he displayed a cautious person’s reasons for not rashly giving up the good living which his art gave him. He wrote:
"I should be glad to go to Europe, but
cannot think of it without a very good
prospect of doing as well there as I can
here. You are sensable that 300 Guineas
a Year, which is my present income, is a
pretty living in America. … And what ever
my ambition may be to excel in our noble
Art, I cannot think of doing it at the expence
of not only my own happyness, but that of
a tender Mother and a Young Brother whose
dependence is intirely upon me".
West replied on the 20th. September 1768, saying that he had talked over Copley’s prospects with other London artists:
"I find that by their Candid approbation
you have nothing to Hazard in Comeing
to this Place."
The income which Copley earned by painting in the 1760’s was extraordinary for his town and time. It had promoted the son of a needy tobacconist into the local aristocracy. The foremost personages of New England came to his painting-room as sitters.
John married, on the 16th. November 1769, Susanna Farnham Clarke, daughter of Richard and Elizabeth (Winslow) Clarke, the former being the very wealthy agent of the Honourable East India Company in Boston; the latter, a New England woman of Mayflower ancestry.
The union was a happy one, and socially notable. Mrs. Copley was a beautiful woman of poise and serenity whose features are familiar through several of her husband’s paintings.
Copley had already bought land on the west side of Beacon Hill extending down to the Charles River. The newly married Copleys, who were to have six children, moved into:
"A solitary house in Boston, on Beacon
Hill, chosen with his keen perception of
picturesque beauty".
It was approximately on the site of the present Boston Women’s City Club. Here were painted the portraits of dignitaries of state and church, graceful women and charming children, in the mode of faithful and painstaking verisimilitude which Copley had made his own.
The family’s style of living at this period was that of people of wealth. John Trumbull told Dunlap that in 1771, being then a student at Harvard College, he called on Copley:
"He was dressed on the occasion in a suit
of crimson velvet with gold buttons, and the
elegance displayed by Copley in his style of
living, added to his high repute as an artist,
made a permanent impression in favor of the
life of a painter."
In town and church affairs Copley took almost no part. He referred to himself as:
"Desireous of avoideing every imputation
of party spirit. Political contests being
neighther pleasing to an artist or
advantageous to the Art itself."
His name appeared on the 29th. January 1771, on a petition of freeholders and inhabitants to have the powder house removed from the town whose existence it imperiled.
Records of the Church in Brattle Square disclose that in 1772 Copley was asked to submit plans for a re-built meeting-house, and that he proposed an ambitious plan and elevation "Which was much admired for its Elegance and Grandure," but which on account likely cost was not accepted.
Copley’s sympathy with the politicians who were working toward American independence appears to have been genuine, but not so vigorous as to lead him to participate in any of their plans.
Copley at one time painted portraits in New York City. The circumstances of this visit, which was supplemented by a few days in Philadelphia, were first disclosed through Prof. Guernsey Jones’s discovery of many previously unpublished Copley and Pelham documents in the Public Record Office, London.
From these letters and papers, published by the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1914, it appears that in 1768 Copley painted in Boston a portrait of Myles Cooper, president of King’s College, who then urged his visiting New York.
Accepting the invitation later, Copley, between June 1771 and January 1772, painted thirty-seven portraits in New York, setting up his easel:
"In Broadway, on the west side, in a house
which was burned in the great conflagration
on the night the British army entered the city
as enemies."
Copley’s letters to Henry Pelham, whom he left in charge of his affairs in Boston, describe minutely the journey across New England and his first impressions of New York:
"It has more Grand Buildings than Boston,
the streets much cleaner and some much
broader."
He also described the successful search for suitable lodgings and a painting-room; thereafter they give detailed accounts of sitters and social happenings. The correspondence also contains Copley’s careful instructions to Pelham concerning the features of a new house then being built on his Beacon Hill "farm," giving elevations and specifications of the addition of "peazas" which the artist saw for the first time in New York.
Copley at the time was engaged in a lawsuit respecting title to some of his lands. His letters reveal a man who allowed such disputes to worry him considerably.
In September 1771, Mr. and Mrs. Copley visited Philadelphia, where, at the home of Chief Justice William Allen:
"We saw a fine Coppy of the Titian Venus
and Holy Family at whole length as large
as life from Coregio".
On their return journey they viewed at New Brunswick, New Jersey several pictures attributed to van Dyck:
"The date is 1628 on one of them, it is
without dout I think Vandyck did them
before he came to England."
Back in New York Copley wrote requesting that a certain black dress of Mrs. Copley’s be sent over at once:
"As we are much in company, we think
it necessary Sukey [his wife] should
have it, as her other Cloaths are mostly
improper for her to wear".
On the 15th. December Copley informed Pelham that:
"This Week finishes all my Business,
no less than 37 Busts; so the weather
permitting by Christmas we hope to
be on the road."
Thus ended Copley’s only American tour away from Boston.
Copley’s correspondents in England continued to urge him to undertake European studies. He saved an undated and unsigned letter from someone who wrote:
"Our people here are enrapture’d with him,
he is compared to Vandyck, Reubens and
all the great painters of Old."
His brother-in-law Jonathan Clarke, already in London, advised his "comeing this way." West wrote, on the 6th. January 1773:
"My Advice is, Mrs. Copley to remain in Boston
till you have made this Tour [to Italy], After which,
if you fix your place of reasidanc in London, Mrs.
Copley to come over."
Political and economic conditions in Boston were increasingly turbulent. Copley’s father-in-law, Mr. Clarke, was the merchant to whom was consigned the tea that provoked the Boston Tea Party. Copley’s family connections were all Loyalists.
John defended his wife’s relatives at a meeting described in a letter of the 1st. December 1773.
He wrote on the 26th. April 1774, of an unpleasant experience when a mob visited his house demanding the person of Col. George Watson, a Loyalist counselor who had gone elsewhere.
"The patriots threatened to have my blood
if I entertained any such Villain for the future.
What a spirit! What if Mr. Watson had stayed
(as I pressed him to) to spend the night.
I must either have given up a friend to the
insult of a Mob or had my house pulled down
and perhaps my family murthered."
john Singleton Copley’s Move to London and the European Tour
With many letters of introduction, all of which are published in the Copley-Pelham correspondence, Copley sailed from Boston in June 1774, leaving his mother, wife, and children in Henry Pelham’s charge. He wrote on the 11th. July 1774 from London "After a most easy and safe passage."
An early call was upon West:
"I find in him those amiable qualitys that
makes his friendship boath desireable as
an artist and as a Gentleman."
In England, Benjamin West and Copley created a new kind of history painting, one with modern, topical subjects, chiefly death scenes of heroes, in a historic manner, but with scrupulous attention to contemporary detail.
John was duly introduced to Sir Joshua Reynolds, and was taken to:
"The Royal Accademy where the
Students had a naked model from
which they were Drawing".
In London Copley took no sitters at this time although urged to do so. Shortly before leaving for Italy he:
"Dined with Gov’r Hutchinson, and I think
there was 12 of us altogether, and all
Bostonians, and we had Choice Salt Fish
for Dinner."
On the 2nd. September 1774, Copley chronicled his arrival in Paris (the beginning of a nine-month European tour), where he saw and painstakingly described many paintings and sculptures. His journey toward Rome was made in the company of an artist named Carter, described as:
"A captious, cross-grained and self conceited
person who kept a regular journal of his tour
in which he set down the smallest trifle that
could bear a construction unfavorable to the
American’s character."
Carter was undoubtedly an uncongenial companion. Copley, however, may at times have been both depressing and bumptious. He found fault, according to Carter, with the French firewood because it gave out less heat than American wood, and he bragged of the art which America would produce when "they shall have an independent government."
Copley’s personal appearance was thus described by his uncharitable comrade:
"Very thin, a little pock-marked [presumably
a souvenir of the Boston smallpox epidemic
described by Copley in a letter of the 24th.
January 1764], prominent eyebrows, small
eyes, which after fatigue seemed a day’s
march in his head."
Copley afterward wrote of Carter:
"He was a sort of snail which crawled over
a man in his sleep and left its slime, and
no more."
Mrs. Amory relates that:
"Both parties were undoubtedly glad
to separate on their arrival at their
destination."
On the 8th. October 1774, Copley was in Genoa, where he wrote to his wife describing, among other things, the inexpensiveness of the silks:
"The velvet and satin for which I gave
seven guineas would have cost fourteen
in London."
He reached Rome on the 26th. October:
"I am very fortunate in my time of being
here, as I shall see the magnificance of
the rejoicing on the election of the Pope;
it is also the year of jubilee, or Holy Year."
Copley’s plan of study and mode of living at Rome are described in several letters. He found time for excursions, and visited Naples in January 1775, writing to his wife:
"The city is very large and delightfully situated,
but you have no idea of the dirt … and the people
are as dirty as the streets – indeed, they are
offensive to such a degree as to make me ill".
The excavations at Pompeii greatly interested him, and in company with Ralph Izard of South Carolina (whose family portrait he later painted) he extended his journey to Paestum. At Rome early in 1775 he copied Correggio’s St. Jerome on commission from Lord Grosvenor, and other works for Mr. and Mrs. Izard.
About the 20th. May he started on a tour northward through Florence, Parma, Mantua, Venice, Trieste, Stuttgart, Mainz, Cologne, and the Low Countries. From Parma he wrote to Henry Pelham urging that the whole family should leave America at once since:
"If the Frost should be severe and the Harbour
frozen, the Town of Boston will be exposed to
an attack; and if it should be taken all that have
remained in the town will be considered as
enimys to the Country and ill treated or exposed
to great distress."
This anxiety proved to be groundless, for Mrs. Copley and the children had already sailed on the 27th. May 1775, from Marblehead in a ship crowded with refugees. She arrived in London some weeks before Copley returned from the Continent, making her home with her brother-in-law, Henry Bromfield.
Her father, Richard Clarke, and her brothers came soon after. Copley happily rejoined his family and set up his easel, at first in Leicester Fields, and later at 25 George St., Hanover Square, in a house built by a wealthy Italian and admirably adapted to an artist’s requirements. Here Mr. and Mrs. Copley and their son Lord Lyndhurst lived and died.
As an English painter Copley began in 1775 a career promising at the outset but which was destined because of personal and political reasons to end in gloom and adversity.
His technique was so well established, his habits of industry so well confirmed, and the reputation that had preceded him from America was so extraordinary, that he could hardly fail to make a place for himself among British artists. He himself, however, often said, after his arrival in England, that he could not surpass some of his early works.
The deterioration of his talent was gradual, however, so some of the "English Copleys" are still superb paintings.
Following a fashion set by West and others, Copley began to paint historical pieces as well as portraits. His first foray into this genre was ‘Watson and the Shark’, its subject based on an incident related to the artist by Brook Watson, who had been attacked by a shark while swimming in Havana harbour as a 14-year-old boy.
It is likely that Watson, who went on to a successful career despite the attack and the loss of his leg below the knee, commissioned the painting as a lesson for other unfortunates, including orphans like himself, to demonstrate that even the severest adversity can be overcome. Engravings of this work achieved an enduring popularity.
For a place over the fireplace of the George Street dining room was painted the great family picture now in Boston, which, when first publicly shown by Lord Lyndhurst at the Manchester exhibition, 1862, was:
"Pronounced by competent critics to
be equal to any, in the same style, by
Vandyck".
However John’s fame as a historical painter was made by ‘The Death of the Earl of Chatham’ showing the collapse in the House of Lords of the former Prime Minister William Pitt, 1st. Earl of Chatham.
The painting, however, brought him denunciation from Sir William Chambers, president of the Royal Academy, who objected to its being exhibited privately in advance of the academy’s exhibition. In an open letter Chambers accused Copley of purveying his picture like a "raree-show" and of aiming for "either the sale of prints or the raffle of the picture."
To this censure, obviously unfair to one newly arrived in London and uninformed as to the professional ethics of exhibiting, Copley one morning wrote a caustic reply, and in the evening wisely threw it into the fire. Engravings from the Chatham picture later sold well in England and America.
Copley’s adventures in historical painting were the more successful because of his painstaking efforts to obtain good likenesses of personages and correct accessories for their periods.
He travelled much in England to make studies of old portraits and actual localities. He painted ‘The Red Cross Knight’, ‘Abraham Offering up Isaac’, ‘Hagar and Ishmael in the Wilderness’, ‘The Death of Major Peirson’, ‘The Arrest of Five Members of the Commons by Charles the First’, ‘The Siege of Gibraltar’, ‘The Surrender of Admiral DeWindt to Lord Camperdown’, ‘The Offer of the Crown to Lady Jane Grey by the Dukes of Northumberland and Suffolk’, ‘The Resurrection’, and others.
He continued to paint portraits, among them those of several members of the royal family and numerous British and American celebrities. Between 1776 and 1815 he sent forty-three paintings to exhibitions of the Royal Academy, of which he was elected an associate member in the former year. His election to full membership occurred in 1783.
The Defeat of the Floating Batteries at Gibraltar, September 1782 (c. 1783) is one of Britain’s largest oil paintings; it depicts the defeat of the floating batteries at Gibraltar during the Great Siege of Gibraltar. The Governor of Gibraltar, General George Augustus Eliott, is on horseback pointing to the rescue of the defeated Spanish sailors by the British.
The effort with which Copley labored over his compositions was exemplary, but at times it may have injured his health and disposition:
Cunningham wrote:
"He has been represented to me by
some as a peevish and peremptory
man, while others describe him as
mild and unassuming."
Both descriptions probably fitted Copley, depending on his mood. His granddaughter, Mrs. Amory, recalled that he usually painted continuously from early morning until twilight. In the evening his wife or a daughter read English literature for his benefit. He took but little exercise – probably not enough for health.
He would have liked to have returned to America, but his professional routine prevented this. He was politically more liberal than were his relatives. He painted the Stars and Stripes over a ship in the background of Elkanah Watson’s portrait on the 5th. December 1782, after listening to George III’s speech formally acknowledging American independence.
Watson wrote in his journal:
"He invited me into the studio, and there,
with a bold hand, a master’s touch, and I
believe an American heart, attached to
the ship the Stars and Stripes; this was, I
imagine, the first American flag hoisted
in Old England."
Copley’s contacts with New England people continued to be many. He painted portraits of John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and other Bostonians who visited England. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1791.
John’s daughter Elizabeth was married in August 1800 to Gardiner Greene of Boston, a wealthy gentleman whose descendants preserved much of the correspondence of the Copley family.
Prior to the marriage of his daughter, Copley had sold his Beacon Hill estate to a syndicate of speculators headed by Dr. Benjamin Joy. He felt himself victimised when he learned that the purchasers knew of a project of building the Massachusetts State House at the top of the hill, and he sent his son John Singleton Copley, Jr., then at the beginning of his brilliant legal career, to Boston in 1796 seeking to annul the arrangement.
The letters which the future Lord Chancellor wrote during his visit to the United States are interesting reading, but his quest was unsuccessful. He wrote to his father:
"I do not believe that any person could
have obtained from them one shilling
more."
Despite this report the artist made further efforts to recover his "farm". The subject of his grievance frequently recurs in the family correspondence, but it is not certain that Copley had any reason to feel himself defrauded. A memorandum prepared for him by Gardiner Greene stated that:
"Long after the land had passed out of
Copley’s possession, it, or a part of it,
was offered at no higher price than was
paid to his son."
Allen Chamberlain, who gives a detailed summary of the complicated negotiations surrounding the sale, holds that Copley was fairly compensated at a price three times what he had paid for property from which he had had rents of considerable amount.
The Decline of John Singleton Copley
In his final fifteen years, although painting persistently, Copley experienced much depression and disappointment. The Napoleonic Wars brought hard times, and the household at 25 George St. was expensive to maintain. The education of a talented son was also costly.
It grieved the father that after the young barrister began to earn his way it became necessary to accept his help in supporting the home. Lord Campbell quotes the jurist as saying that "his father, having lived rather expensively, accumulated little for him."
Mrs. Amory makes out a case for Mrs. Copley’s admirable management, but it appears that a standard of living difficult to maintain in the changed circumstances made much borrowing inevitable. Copley was chagrined by the failure of his Equestrian Portrait of the Prince Regent to bring a financial return. Other canvases involving years of labor went unsold.
Troubles with engravers were many, whether the fault was theirs or the painter’s. Copley’s letters to his son-in-law in Boston usually concerned loans made to him that were frequently extended.
The ageing artist’s physical and mental health produced anxiety. In 1810 he had a bad fall which kept him from painting for a month. He incessantly bewailed the loss of his Boston property. Mrs. Copley wrote on the 11th. December 1810:
"Your father has been led to feel
this affair [his unsuccessful litigation
to recover the "farm"] more sensibly
from the present state of things in
this country where every difficulty of
living is increasing and the advantages
arising from his profession are
decreasing".
In October 1811, Copley wrote to Greene in distress, craving an additional loan of £600. And on the 4th. March 1812, he wrote:
"I am still pursuing my profession in the
hope that, at a future time, a proper
amount will be realized from my works,
either to myself or family, but at this
moment all pursuits which are not among
the essentials of life are at a stand".
In August 1813, Mrs. Copley wrote that, although her husband was still painting, "he cannot apply himself as closely as he used to do."
She reported in April 1814:
"Your father enjoys his health but grows
rather feeble, dislikes more and more to
walk; but it is still pleasant for him to go
on with his painting."
In June 1815, the Copleys entertained John Quincy Adams, with whom they jubilantly discussed the new terms of peace between the United States and the United Kingdom.
In the letter describing this visit the painter’s infirmities are said to have been increased by his cares and disappointments.
A note of the 18th. August 1815 informed the Greenes that Copley while at dinner had had a paralytic stroke. He seemed at first to recover, and later in August his prognosis was favorable to his painting again.
However a second stroke occurred, and John died in London at the age of 77 on the 9th. September 1815. His daughter Mary wrote:
"He was perfectly resigned and willing
to die, and expressed his firm trust in
God, through the merits of our Redeemer."
John was buried in Croydon Minster in Croydon, Surrey.
How deep into debt Copley had fallen in his final years was hinted at in Mrs. Copley’s letter of the 1st. February 1816 to Gardiner Greene in which she gave details of his assets and borrowings and predicted:
"When the whole property is disposed
of and applied toward the discharge of
the debts a large deficiency must, it is
feared, remain."
The estate was settled by Copley’s son, later Lord Lyndhurst, who maintained the establishment in George Street, supported his mother down to her death in 1836. Lord Lyndhurst kept the ownership of many of his father’s unsold paintings until the 5th. March 1864, when they were sold at auction in London. Several of the works from the auction are now in American collections.
The Legacy of John Singleton Copley
According to art historian Paul Staiti, Copley was the greatest and most influential painter in colonial America, producing about 350 works of art.
With his startling likenesses of persons and things, he came to define a realist art tradition in America. His visual legacy extended throughout the nineteenth century in the American taste for the work of artists as diverse as Fitz Henry Lane and William Harnett.
In Great Britain, while he continued to paint portraits for the élite, his great achievement was the development of contemporary history painting, which was a combination of reportage, idealism, and theatre.
He was also one of the pioneers of the private exhibition, orchestrating shows and marketing prints of his own work to mass audiences that might otherwise attend exhibitions only at the Royal Academy, or who previously had not gone to exhibitions at all.
Boston’s Copley Square, Copley Square Hotel and Copley Plaza bear his name, as do Copley Township and Copley crater on Mercury.
A 5-cent stamp commemorating John Singleton Copley was issued by the U.S. Postal Service in 1965 – the 150th. anniversary of his death – featuring his daughter, Elizabeth Clark Copley, in his painting Portrait of the Copley family (1776).
