Word: painterly
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Copley's origins were humble. Born in 1738, he was raised by his widowed Irish mother, who sold tobacco in a dockside shop; his education was sparse. Beyond that, 18th century Boston presented him with special difficulties in becoming a painter--obstacles that are almost unimaginable today. Boston had no drawing schools or art collections; a cabinetmaker there could see first-class examples of English furniture, which the elite of Massachusetts bought in quantity, but no budding artist could lay eyes on an original work by Sir Joshua Reynolds, let alone by Rembrandt or Raphael. With luck he could...
Copley was, in fact, the first American painter really to prosper on his home ground. To do so, he had to rise socially. The portrait painter has to have the same values, and preferably move in the same social sphere, as his clients. He must know the details of dress, possessions, gesture, expression--the whole theater of a sitter's self-representation--from within. Titian, Rubens, Van Dyck and Reynolds had shown that; and Copley, in a smaller domain, knew it too. In 1769 he cemented his place in the upper crust of Massachusetts by marrying Susannah Clarke, daughter...
Copley sent it, through a seagoing friend, directly to Reynolds in London, the foremost portraitist of his age. Reynolds wrote back, urging him to cross the Atlantic at once: "You would be... one of the first Painters in the World," if only he came "before your Manner and Taste were corrupted or fixed by working in your little way in Boston." West, the American painter who had already made a career in London, agreed. He found Copley's style too "liny," harsh and emphatic in outline but felt that could be corrected by "a sight of what has been done...
...aura of confusion both as an aegis for uncomfortable secrets and an illumination of Bergman's views on himself as an artist. He simply offers too many layers of perception for his viewers to discern properly between them. The viewer struggles with the same fear of uncertainty as the painter Johan...
...also features first editions and a plaster life mask of the poet done when he was 19 by painter Benjamin Haydon...