John Singleton Copley and the heroes of the American Revolution

Wealthy landowners such as Moses Gill and James Warren, who rallied under the patriot banner, sat for Copley, as did such prosperous importers as Nicholas Boylston and Benjamin Hallowell, whose businesses virtually required them to support the Loyalist position. Copley's father-in-law, Richard Clarke (1711-1796), was himself one of the merchants who owned the shipment of tea that was dumped into Boston harbor on the night of December 16, 1773, which might suggest that the painter's loyalties rested with the Tory side. However, he also considered a number of patriots among his friends. Although he did not often allow politics to enter overtly into his art, certain of his pictures took on a political importance as the Revolution drew near, and just as he fashioned images for his merchant subjects that expressed their social aspirations, so also did some of his paintings reveal his sitters' attitudes about the compelling issues of the day.

Copley was eighteenth-century Boston's, and arguably America's, greatest portrait painter. He had the good fortune to begin his career in a period of relative political calm and economic prosperity. By about 1758, the tide in the endless war with the French was beginning to turn in favor of Britain. The battles were fought many miles away from Boston, which consequently enjoyed many of the economic benefits, but few of the privations, of the conflict. Copley's portraits were designed to advertise that prosperity and to underscore affiliations with the British. Thus the portrait of the stylish Theodore Atkinson Jr. of Portsmouth, New Hampshire (Pl. XIV), was devised to show the young man's emulation of the English gentry. His formal rose-brown velvet suit and elegant white silk waistcoat embroidered in silver display English needlework at its finest. His casual, cross-legged stance echoes British portraits of aristocratic gentlemen at their ease. As prescribed in English manuals of etiquette, his hat is tucked under his arm in a model of elegant deportment.(2)

Similarly, the pretty young daughters of the wealthy trader Isaac Royall of Medford, Massachusetts (Pl. XV), are shown in dresses that proclaim the family's Anglophilia. Elizabeth's costume, made of yards of expensive imported yellow silk, was a real dress and very much in fashion in the 1750's. Mary's dress is a mixture of fantasy and reality, its scalloped sleeves in particular imitating a seventeenth-century style that was especially popular just then at English fancy dress parties. The girls' gestures indicate sisterly affection, while their exotic, adoring pets - a King Charles spaniel and a hummingbird, possibly brought to Medford from the West Indies in one of their fathers ships - bear witness to their tender natures. Yet over-all, the painting is less a presentation of character than an expression of Isaac Royall's materialism. The Royall sisters are presented as the offspring of a grandee.

Tokens of Anglophilia multiplied in Copley's portraits over the next few years. Not only did his sitters wear the finest English cloth, but they also appeared in settings and assumed poses that were derived from English prints. During this period allegiance to the mother country was seldom questioned, so that associations with the British aristocracy were seen as flattering, not politically charged, as they soon became. In 1764, for example, the genial Moses Gill (Pl. XIII) could exult in being depicted in a pose most likely taken from an engraving after a famous portrait by Thomas Hudson (1701-1779) of George, Viscount Town-shend(3) - an officer in the army whose despised presence in Boston only four years later galvanized the thoughts and actions of Gill and his fellow patriots.

When Hannah Hill Quincy was painted by Copley about 1761 (Pl. XII), she chose to be shown in the guise of Helena Fourment in the famous portrait by Rubens (then thought to be by Van Dyck), which had entered a prominent British collection in 1730 and touched off a frenzy for seventeenth-century costume portraits among upper-class English women.(4) Dressing a la Vandyke was also in vogue at masquerades and other public entertainments in England, although in Boston the fashion was little known. Mrs. Quincy is thus presented as being in the vanguard of taste through an association designed to flatter and to win the admiration of friends. Such a conceit was perfect for a woman known to be fond of social engagements.

Samuel Quincy (Pl. XI), Hannah's husband, was more concerned with social matters than with professional advancement. His distant cousin John Adams credited him with having one of the finest legal minds in Boston, but when they were at Harvard College in the 1750's, he found him to be unduly preoccupied by "Cards, Fiddles, and Girls."(5) The debonair Quincy was a Whig through the 1760's, but by the end of the decade he traveled increasingly in the company of Loyalists. Such friendships caused Adams to question whether Quincy's "love of pomp and gaiety and other social extravagancies" might not have led him to "sacrifice his principles."(6) Hannah Quincy, however, remained a staunch Whig, and when her husband left for England in May 1775, she elected to stay behind. Her portrait by Copley, conceived as a bid for affiliation with the latest British fashion, ultimately became a memorial to an era when such an aspiration was without cost or consequence.