copley’s boston childhood --10/2/26

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Today's selection -- from A Revolution in Color by Jane Kamensky. The Boston childhood of portrait artist John Singleton Copley, who painted portraits of the well-to-do in New England, then moved to London just before the American Revolution to ply his trade there. Boston was then the uneasy amalgam of pious Calvinism and the cosmopolitan merchant trading business by which it flourished:

"After becoming well-established as a portrait painter of the wealthy in colonial New England, he moved to London in 1774, never returning to America. In London, he met considerable success as a portraitist for the next two decades, and also painted a number of large history paintings, which were innovative in their readiness to depict modern subjects and modern dress. His later years were less successful, and he died heavily in debt. He was father of John Copley, 1st Baron Lyndhurst and half-brother of Henry Pelham, the American painter, engraver, and cartographer.

“John Singleton Copley grew up facing the sea, heaving heart of Britain's growing blue-water empire. He lived with his mother in three rooms of a small wooden house along Boston's Long Wharf, an arm of land that jutted into the harbor, as if reaching for London thousands of miles across the ocean. The clapboard buildings that lined one side of the wharf were attached, side to side. The windows on the north faced the older and denser part of the town, where the streets had names like Ship and Fleet and Fish. Boats moored on the south side of the wharf, just a few feet from the Copleys' front door. Facing that way from the second-floor window, the boy would have seen masts and sails, shipyards and ropewalks. He fell asleep to the twang of halyards and woke to the shouts of sailors and hawkers, and strumpets trudging home from the taverns to sleep.

Self-portrait, c. 1769

“Every now and again, on the king's birthday, or on a feast day declared in honor of a military victory, Jack (as he was known) would have heard celebratory blasts from Castle William, where a hundred mounted cannon guarded the king’s island fortress, the empire’s might on display even there, at the mouth of a harbor at the edge of the British imagination. Jack and his mother lived in a world where war was the rule, peace the exception. On the day he was born, 3 July 1738, the Boston Gazette reprinted an article from the Jamaica Courant, which excerpted a letter from Paris, which offered a clutch of prognostications. For 1738: ‘War will be declar’d throughout the whole World.’ The prophecy was not fulfilled that year, but it would be, several times, during the boy’s long life.

“Like many trading centers, Jack Copley's Boston was a shockingly cosmopolitan place: the ‘Metropolis of New England ... the largest, most populous and flourishing Town in the British Dominions in America,’ as a map printed there in 1743 put it. The plan's cartouche featured Neptune, god of the sea, on one side, and Mercury, god of commerce, on the other. The king's colors dotted the harbor, fluttering from a forest of masts made of tall white New England pine, on hundreds of ships every year. Jack was born in summer, the best season for sailing as it was for painting. Dockworkers busied themselves unloading cargoes from Antigua and Surinam and Honduras, from Lisbon and the Canary Islands, from Rhode Island and Connecticut, and filling the hulls of ships bound for London and Jamaica and Newfoundland. Merchants advertised Carolina indigo and German steel and Madeira wine and Irish linen. There was also, on the last page of the Gazette on the day of Jack's birth, as on most days, an anonymous notice offering for sale a human being: a ‘healthy strong Negro Boy,’ aged about fifteen. That boy or his parents or their parents likely came from West Central Africa, via the Caribbean, where Boston merchants traded fish and lumber for sugar and cotton and sometimes slaves. The Copleys, too, set themselves up as traders in faraway goods. From a storefront below their little flat, Jack's mother sold ‘the best Virginia Tobacco, Cut, Pigtail, and spun, of all Sorts, by Wholesale or Retail, at the cheapest Rates.’

“The Boston of Jack's boyhood was also, in roughly equal measure, a parochial place, wary of strangers and aggressively pious, even by the standards of its day. A hundred years before his birth, the founders of the Massachusetts Bay colony had proclaimed, with a confidence all the more poignant for its absurdity, that they would create, in this new England, a shining city on a hill for all Christendom to emulate. A century later, Boston was home to some seventeen thousand souls gathered in sixteen churches, most of them of a stringent Calvinist stripe. From sundown on Saturdays until dawn on Mondays, ferries stopped and shops closed tight. Even a stroll across the Common or along the waterfront was forbidden on the Lord's Day. On Sundays and fast days, the boy and his mother woke to a symphony of bells. The Gazette's little group of prophecies forecast that in 1748, the year Jack turned ten, ‘Jesus Christ will come to Judge the World.”