Realism

Masterpiece Oil Paintings Reproduction Gallery

John Singleton Copley (b. 1738, Boston, d. 1815, London).American painter of portraits and historical subjects, generally acclaimed as the finest artist of colonial America.Little is known of Copley’s boyhood. He developed within a flourishing school of colonial portraiture, and it was as a portraitist that he reached the high point of his art, and – as his Boston portraits later revealed – he gained an intimate knowledge of his New England subjects and milieu and was able to convey a powerful sense of physical entity and directness – real people seen as they are. From his stepfather, the limner and engraver Peter Pelham, Copley gained familiarity with graphic art as well as an early sense of vocation. Before he was 20 he was an accomplished draughtsman. To the Rococo portrait style derived from the English painter Joseph Blackburn he brought his own powers of imagination and a technical ability surpassing anyone painting in America at the time. Copley, in his portraits, made eloquent use of a Rococo device, the portrait d’apparat – portraying the subject with the objects associated with him in his daily life – that gave his work a liveliness and acuity not usually associated with 18th-century American painting.