Word: copley
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Boston is historical in other ways; and it is best to see by walking. If you start at Copley Square and walk north, you will come eventually to the docks, and can cross the Charles, if you like, to Charlestown and to Chelsea. On the way, the Public Gardens come first, and are somewhat bleak now and lack swan boats, but there is, still, a picture-taking man with his venerable camera. Higher up, on Tremont Street and nearer the state Capitol, an old man used to sell catnip. He kept his stand next to the Old Granary Burial Ground...
...childhood accident, and second, he was a gentleman. Picturemaking, for the handsome son of the governor of Connecticut, was unthinkable. Accordingly, odd John was packed off to Harvard for polishing. There, however, he called on the greatest of American portraitists, John Singleton Copley, and painted and copied all the pictures he could. He was one of the first male American aristocrats to take brush in hand (Copley came from Boston's waterfront...
...artists trooped through the ornate white marble Palacio de las Bellas Artes to see what a fledgling U.S. collector had put together in a few years. The viewers saw a handsome survey of 57 paintings and six sculptures covering 180 years of U.S. art, from a serene John Singleton Copley portrait, Mrs. Roger Morris, finished in 1772, to first modern works by Watercolorists Charles Burchfield and John Marin, Painters Charles Sheeler, Edward Hopper and Morris Graves...
...Copley had invented Romantic horror-painting, but he never followed up his invention. That remained for Frenchman Theodore Gericault, whose Raft of the Medusa (see color) came 40 years later. Critics have made much of what Gericault owed to Michelangelo and Caravaggio, have tended to overlook his connection with Copley. Yet the similarity of composition (a pyramid tilted toward the horizon) and especially of spirit argues for Gericault's having known Copley's picture. Splendid though they are. both Copley's and Gericault's men-against-the-sea-scapes seem as dated today as they once...
Brook Watson and the Shark was Copley's only real contribution to European art. Actually the work of his London peers (Romney. Gainsborough. Reynolds, West) corrupted Copley's homespun realism. To compete in such fast and fashionable company, the old dog learned a pathetic array of new tricks. He kept on painting industriously until his death at 77, but his ice-clear eye gradually veiled, his granite-firm hand practiced soft flamboyance, his powers slipped away like spirits bored with too much worldliness, sick of success...