Word: copley
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...Artists, 1775-1800," organized by Art Historian Nina Fletcher Little, illustrates the limner tradition with 76 paintings by 34 artists, backed up with domestic objects of the sort that appears in those stiff, poignant effigies-chairs, painted floorcloths, a child's coral-garnished silver whistle. The other show, "Copley, Stuart, West," deals with the first three American-born painters to escape from this matrix and enter the European arena in order to become, in the full sense of the word, professional artists...
...first to go. He went to Italy and then to London, where he became court painter to George III. That a colonial could bring off such a feat was regarded as singular. It turned him into a precocious father figure for later Yankee expatriates, notably Copley and Stuart. Here was their lesson in making it: the teen-age limner who, thanks to Rome and practical ambition, rose to become the second president of the Royal Academy. In fact, West was by temperament an ideal official artist: studious, methodical, competent, a bovine draftsman. But his neoclassical work, done under the first...
There were, of course, problems of assimilation. When John Singleton Copley (1738-1815) went to Italy, he also struggled to resolve them in his first European picture, an Ascension (1775), which must be one of the quaintest homages to Raphael ever made. But in the same year he met two wealthy American tourists and painted their portrait...
...Ralph Izard was, by prevailing American standards, a work of sophistication. The image of the South Carolinian discoursing to his wife upon the meaning of a drawing from the antique is almost poignant; there cannot have been too many couples like them back home. Copley was a brilliant recorder of the human face, the female face especially. The portraits of the middle-aged women he painted in the 1760s are so dense and assured, warts and all, that one may well prefer them to the more florid exercises in the manner of Gainsborough that Copley resorted to when, in London...
...show (put between hard covers), the Dictionary of National Biography and a PEOPLE magazine approach to Revolutionary history. George Washington Biographer Thomas Flexner opens the show with some pithy talk about the emerging American man and ends by discussing early American painters, including notes on how John Singleton Copley saved money on costumes for his female portraits by putting a number of Yankee ladies into the same pose and dress, both copied from a 15-year-old London illustration (see pictures, previous column). There follow more than a hundred full-page portraits of colonial gentry, and of Revolutionary celebrities from...