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It was there in 1768 that Charles Wilson Peale, his junior by four years, came to him for
instruction, and there Trumbull, then a boy of sixteen, visited him, finding him about to receive a party of
friends at dinner, and remembered to the end of his life his costume and appearance. "An elegant-looking man,
dressed in a fine maroon cloth with gilt buttons," and probably the impression was influential in determining
him later to become a painter himself. It is worth while to add that the visit was not made "at the time of
his (Copley's) marriage" (he had been married two years), nor did he wear "a suit of crimson velvet with gold
buttons," both of which statements are carelessly made by Dunlap, and being more picturesque than Trumbull's
own accounts have been generally copied by biographers.
Thus Copley passed his early manhood with such an honorable position and so assured an income that he hesitated to
leave it for the larger but more hazardous opportunities of London. He himself wrote in
1767:
"I
am now in as good business as the poverty of this place will admit. I make as much money as if I were a Raphael or
a Correggio, and three hundred guineas a year, my present income, is equal to nine hundred a year in London." These
reflections were probably prompted by the reception at the London Society of Artists of his portrait of his
half-brother, Henry Pelham, known as the " Boy with the Squirrel," which he had sent to West with a letter
requesting that it might be shown in the exhibition. The letter was delayed, and the rules of the society, then a
comparatively new institution, forbade the admission of anonymous work; but West, from the pine of which the
stretcher was made and from the flying squirrel, recognized the painting as the work of an American, and with his
customary kindliness urged that it should be hung, praising the "delicious color, worthy of Titian himself." The
picture was shown in the exhibition of 1766, and much admired. His name appeared in the catalogue as Mr. William
Copely of Boston, New England. The next year, when he sent a full length of a lady with a bird and dog, he is Mr.
Copley, and in 1768 his name is given in full and correctly. He sent that year a half-length portrait of a
gentleman and another of a lady, the latter in crayon. In 1771 and 1772 he appears again as Mr. Copely with, in the
latter year, the
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