John Singleton Copley
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Joshua looked at Bruce with increasing amazement as
the sea captain told him that Copley, although twenty-eight years old, had never been out of the provincial
city of Boston, and had never in his life seen a picture worthy to be called a painting. Bruce was to write
home to Copley that Reynolds had said: "Considering the disadvantages you had laboured under, it is a very
wonderful performance. . . . He did not know one painter at home, who had all the advantages that Europe
could give them, that could equal it, and that if you are capable of producing such a piece by the mere
efforts of your.own genius, with the advantages of example and instruction which you could have in Europe,
you would be a valuable acquisition to the art and one of the first painters in the world." In fact,
Reynolds was so excited that he forgot to write down the name of the painter. Thus it came about that the
first picture of John Singleton Copley to be publicly exhibited anywhere in the world was mislabelled; the
artist's name was given as "William Copley."
The romantic story of the masterpiece that had emerged
unheralded from the wilderness soon spread through the compact art world of London. Connoisseurs flocked to
see the picture of a provincial child leaning intently over a table where stood a strange animal. Soon the
name of Copley was on every cultivated tongue. On the strength of this one picture, the unknown and misnamed
painter was given the highest honour the English art world could offer: he was elected a member of the
Society of Artists. People wondered how such a genius could have sprung up spontaneously under the shadow of
America's primeval trees.
The best evidence that exists, which however is by no means
conclusive, indicates that John Singleton Copley was born in or near Boston on July 3, 1738, a few months
before Benjamin West. According to family tradition, his parents, who were of English stock, had arrived
from Ireland at about that time, and his father had sailed on to the West Indies, where he died shortly
after the boy was born. Copley's early years are shrouded in mystery, for the inhabitants of Boston, with
whom the searching of genealogical records is almost a mania, have been unable to find any mention of his
birth or baptism.
A newspaper advertisement, however, shows that before
Copley was ten his mother was living over a tobacco shop she operated on Long Wharf. Boston was at that time
the largest city of British America and the most important commercial centre. Since the old harbour, most'of
which is now filled in with land, was very shallow, the end of the main street had been extended some two
thousand feet out into the bay to form a pier so broad that houses could be built on one side. In one of
these Copley spent his early childhood. Looking from the back windows, he saw water lapping the foundation
of his dwelling, and from the front windows he had a view that seemed calculated to make any boy's heart
swell with the romance of travel and far places. Separated from his house by only a fifteen-foot walk lay
moored the square-rigged boats that brought Boston its prosperity; sometimes twenty or more were tied to the
long quay. The day and the night as well were loud with the creaking of blocks, as square sails blossomed
from high spars.
Daily the boats came to and fro; daily the future
painter watched ships emerge tiny from between the outlying islands and grow momentarily larger until the
wild cormorant of the ocean lay bobbing at rest by his front door. He watched the sailors stand in a dizzy
line on the rigging as they lashed down the furled sails, and then his mother's tobacco shop would be full
of the sound of voices. Standing behind the counter, answering with alacrity demands for tobacco "cut,
pigtail, or spun," the boy served mariners who had returned from the seven seas. These gaudy men with gold
rings in their ears had been to Africa, where they had exchanged sperm candles and rum for slaves; they had
carried their human merchandise to the West Indies, where men were exchanged for molasses; and already
there was a rumbling in the street as the hogsheads of molasses were being rolled toward distilleries where
they would be changed into more rum with which to obtain a new harvest of black slaves. Sometimes, perhaps,
the crinkly-skinned sailors brought queer idols into Mrs. Copley's tobacco shop, and the youngster stared in
amazement at the brown grotesques that would in another hundred and fifty years inspire a school of
painters as different from the work he was to do as it was possible to be. How stories must have leapt from
mouth to mouth as the blue smoke drifted toward the ceiling! Silent bays on the fringes of jungle, black
potentates under canopies accompanied everywhere by a whisper of drums; and then a sudden change to the
Spanish mansions of the West Indies, white in a glaring sun, where resplendent dons scraped and bowed, and
where from behind barred windows came a tinkle of castanets—castanets that were drowned out by the tomtom
beat of slaves returning at evening from the fields. And between these scenes that floated like islands on
the narrators' memories there were months of sailing to describe. Seas calm or riotous; strange, half-human
albatrosses that followed tall masts; and sometimes blue lights gleaming from each of the ship's pinnacles,
the corposants that boded—who knows?—disaster or prosperity, and made even blaspheming boatswains
pray.