John Singleton Copley was born in Boston, July 3, 1737. His father was of a Yorkshire family long settled in County Limerick, Ireland, where he married and with his wife came to Boston in 1736. He died in the West Indies about the time of his son's birth. His widow went into the tobacco trade and sold, as one of her notices sets forth, "the best Virginia Tobacco, Cut, Pigtail, Spun, by Wholesale and Retail, at the cheapest rates," and was long a popu­lar and well-known dealer in Boston. Nine or ten years after her first husband's death she married Peter Pelham, an event of the greatest advantage and importance to the boy. 

Pelham was a mezzotint engraver of serious merit. John Chaloner Smith's "Catalogue of British Engravers" shows that he executed some thirty-six plates, more than half of them in England. His American work consists largely of heads of divines from un­skilful originals, and of necessity without beauty, but occasionally, as in the portrait of Sir William Pepperell after Smybert, he got a fairly attractive subject, and produced a good plate. He came to America about 1726 but found little call for his skill there, so that he took advantage of his education, which seems to have been unusually good, by opening a school where he taught "Reading, Writing, Needlework, Dancing, and the art of Painting upon Glass." He continued his school after his marriage, and also practised his art when he found opportunity. He seems to have claimed and been allowed a good social standing, writing "gentleman" after his signature in a surety bond, the other witness being but a peruke-maker.   When he died he is described as "schoolmaster." 

He engraved a number of portraits of divines, some of them from his own paintings, and was a man well known and esteemed. It is certain that Smybert was intimate with him and reasonably cer­tain that under the circumstances then prevailing at Boston he knew the other painters and engravers there. He died in 1751, when his stepson was but fourteen; but the boy was precocious and had already made some progress in drawing. His first known work is said to be a portrait of his stepfather, and a couple of years after he painted a portrait of his stepbrother, Charles Pelham, and the next year, when he was sixteen, published an engraving of the Rev. William Welsteed from a painting by himself.   He continued

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