On July 3, 1738, celebrated artist John Singleton Copley was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Copley rose from modest colonial beginnings to become the premier portrait painter of the pre‑Revolutionary era, famously capturing the likenesses of iconic figures like John Hancock, Paul Revere, and Samuel Adams.
The fascinating tension in Copley’s life is that while his historic paintings practically defined the visual aesthetic of the American Revolution, Copley himself was a deeply conflicted British Loyalist. As political violence erupted in his hometown of Boston, he found himself caught directly in the middle. His father‑in‑law was the wealthy merchant Richard Clarke, whose firm owned the tea that was thrown into the harbor during the Boston Tea Party. Alarmed by the rising turmoil and unwilling to choose sides, Copley left for London in 1774—on the eve of the Revolution—never to return, spending the rest of his career painting for the British aristocracy.
Image: John Singleton Copley by Gilbert Stuart c. 1784 (in case you’re wondering, the 1784 date for the painting is correct because Copley was living in London by then. He left America in 1774 and never returned, and Gilbert Stuart was also working in London in the early 1780s — so Stuart painted Copley there around 1784.)
