Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 12.djvu/184

 recognised that General (then Colonel) George Washington sat to him for his portrait, and he seems to have found in the succeeding years a good deal to do in painting the portraits of local and other celebrities. From 1758 onwards he made rapid strides in his art, both as a draughtsman and colourist. Of two of his portraits, Colonel and Mrs. Lee, painted in 1769, he often spoke in his later years as of an excellence which he never surpassed. Mrs. Pelham and her son moved in the best society of Boston, and that society was composed of remarkable elements, in which learning and general culture, statesmanship and business capacity, borrowed refinement from the presence of many women conspicuous for beauty and accomplishments. Copley was not the only artist there. The younger Smibert, Greenwood, and Blackburn all practised as portrait-painters. From these he could not have learned much, though his pictures of this period, it is said, show that he had imitated and surpassed Blackburn in the treatment of his draperies, in which Blackburn excelled. There were a few good pictures by European masters in Boston, to which Copley, of course, had access, among them two portraits by Vandyck and one by Sir Godfrey Kneller. But, like most men of genius, Copley had to trust to his own persistent study and practice and his close habit of observation for those qualities in his pictures which gave them value. The multitude of his portraits executed in America is sufficient proof of his industry and conscientiousness. His prices were of a very modest character, but by 1771 they had placed him in fairly comfortable circumstances. He is described by a Colonel Trumbull, who then visited him, as ‘living in a beautiful house fronting on a fine open common; attired in a crimson velvet suit, laced with gold, and having everything about him in very handsome style.’ His income, it appears from one of his letters, was ‘three hundred guineas a year, equal to nine hundred a year in London,’ and in 1773 he was the owner of about eleven acres of land, ‘the fine open common’ above spoken of, on which the finest and most populous portion of the city of Boston is now built. On 16 Nov. 1769 Copley married Miss Susannah Farnum Clarke, daughter of Richard Clarke, a leading Boston merchant, soon afterwards famous as the consignee of the cargoes of tea which were thrown into the sea at Boston (16 Dec. 1773) by the citizens of Boston, disguised as Mohawk Indians, by way of protest against the tea duties recently imposed by England. It was characteristic of Copley's conscientious nature that he did not marry until he was able to offer to the beautiful, accomplished, and amiable woman whom he made his wife the assurance of a settled home, and the companionship of a man whose work was even then recognised in England as giving promise of a great future. In 1766, not 1760, as stated by Allan Cunningham and other biographers, he had sent to his countryman, Benjamin West, then for three years established in London, a picture representing a boy, his half-brother, Henry Pelham, seated at a table with a squirrel. The picture showed the hand of a master. No letter accompanied it, but that it was from America West concluded from the canvas being stretched on American pine, and the squirrel being a flying squirrel peculiar to its western forests. Conjecture as to the artist was subsequently removed by a letter from Copley requesting West's good offices to get it into the exhibition of the Society of Incorporated Artists. This was a privilege denied by the rules of the society to all but members. Such, however, were the merits of the picture, that the rule was waived, and Copley's reputation was at once established among his English brethren. Next year he sent over for exhibition by the society, of which he was now admitted a member, a full-length portrait of a young lady with a bird and a dog. This picture, as well as that of the previous year, had an interest beyond that of mere portraiture. Both were sent over to be sold, ‘should any one be inclined to purchase them,’ Copley writes to an English friend, ‘at such a price as you may think proper.’ Sold they probably were at a higher price than they would have fetched in America. But ‘The Boy with the Squirrel,’ if it ever was sold, came again into the hands of the painter. It remained one of the most cherished possessions of his son, Lord Lyndhurst [see, the younger, ], and after his death was bought (5 March 1864) for 230 guineas at the sale of his pictures by Mrs. Amory of Boston, a granddaughter of the artist. Desire to see the masterpieces of antique art, and more particularly of the great painters of Italy, and the natural ambition to try his fate in competition with the living artists of the age, had by this time taken a strong hold of Copley's mind. But the hazards of the venture were serious. ‘I might in the experiment,’ he writes to a friend in England, ‘waste a thousand pounds and two years of my time, and have to return baffled to America.’ In 1768 he leaves it to his friend West's more experienced judgment to say whether or not the time was ripe for his coming to Europe, begging