Word: copley
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...painter, died in 1751, leaving his studio to his thirteen-year-old stepson. In the course of the next two years, that studio studio provided the nutriment for what became one of the richest and most vital careers in the history American painting. Pelham's stepson was John Singleton Copley, and his career is commemorated this year a major retrospective exhibition of his work. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Washington's National Gallery, and the Metropolitan Museum of New York have gathered 103 oils, pastels, minatures, and drawing (including seven works from Harvard) for a show that will...
...fifteen, Copley embarked on his artistic career with a mezzotint portrait of the Reverend William Welsteed, the recently deceased minister of Boston's New Brick Church. The similarity between this portrait and Peter Pelham's 1743 mezzotint of the Reverend Mr. William Cooper is more than a stylistic one. Copley actually took the original Pelham plate and altered the features to fit the new commission...
...Pelham's mezzotints also made an indelible mark on the style of Copley's original work. His first paintings are marked by flat planes and a strong linearity and by the broad, forceful highlights that eventually developed into the massive areas of bold color that served him so well in later years...
...gives us a clue to many of his later ambitions. His interest in historical themes, and in the extensive anatomical research (see below) that forms the groundwork for that genre, is clear in these works. But in America artists had to seek their bread and butter in portraiture, and Copley was forced to abandon his ambitions as a painter of history until his emigration to England...
...skillful rococo colorist named Joseph Blackburn arrived from England. He immediately became an established painter in Boston and his work had a profound influence on Copley's portraiture. Blackburn's colors were light and gentle but the elegance of Blackburn's style drew out of Copley the sensitivity as a colorist which characterizes all of his later work. Though Blackburn had a great influence on Copley, Copley's individuality as a painter was never obscured; the characteristic sharp contrasts of light and dark (chiarascuro effects), the bold, saturated colors, and the free, heavy impasto (paint thickness) persist throughout most...