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John Singleton Copley, A Boy with a Flying Squirrel (Henry Pelham), 1765

NOTE Paragraph

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So, imagine wanting to be an artist,

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but you live in a city where there are virtually no artists, no art schools, no art museums, no galleries

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and no one who wants to buy serious paintings.

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This is precisely the situation John Singleton Copley found himself in, in Boston the 1760's.

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We're looking at a potrait of Copley's half brother

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This is Henry Pelham and the painting is called 'Boy with Flying Squirrel'

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So for some body who is largely self taught, the painting is pretty remarkable,

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my gaze first goes to his face, that wonderful red curtain,

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that gathers my attention and frames that face so beautifully, but when i'm done there

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my eye runs down his shoulder, down his arm and to his hand

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and just look at the precision with which those fingertips are rendered

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and they so beautifully and loosely hold that gold chain.

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My eye then runs down, of course to the squirrel, its wonderfully cute and its nibbling on a little nut

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which then links up to the area where his dark coat on his back

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meet with the white coat of his belly

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which mirrors the edge of the sidrous cuff. And then on the cuff, on one side you have the

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light catching and on the near side you have that area in shadow

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that just plays beautifully alternating against itself

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so while this is a portrait of Copley's half brother , its also

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a kind of demonstration piece. By 1765 when Copley painted this he was a well regarded professional potrait painter

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in Boston but he wanted to be more. Copley also knew that portrait painting was actually the bottom

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of a hierarchy of subjects created by the academies in Europe, the highest paintings being

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paintings of religion and mythology and history, portraiture and still life being the lowest.

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But it was portraits that people wanted in new American cities

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Right, so the merchant class in boston, the wealthy elite had begun to really recognize the value of portraying themselves

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But Copley wanted to push beyond that. Copley knew that Europe painting was more

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and so this painting was actually made, as you said as a demonstration piece

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to see if he could hold his own with the European academies

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So he had this packed up in someone's luggage who was going off to London

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and there it was pretty well received by Benjamin West, an American painter who was living in London and was pretty succesfull

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and by sir Joshua Reynolds who was president of the Royal Academy in England

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so the first thing we might notice is that we are not looking at the

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front of the figures face, we are looking at him from the side

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so we think that Copley did this he wanted to show that he could paint not just portraits

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but also genre paintings where scenes of everyday life

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i think copley was also really showing off what he could do with fore shortening

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which is really a difficult thing to do if you look at

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the sitters right hand its just perfectly fore shortened as is the corner of the table.

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when this painting goes to England, Sir Joshua Reynold does praise it

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but he says , before too long he better come to London and get some real training

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here before your manner and taste are corrupted or fixed by working in this little way

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in Boston which i think, makes sense because the way that England ruled as this important artistic presence

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Copley felt that the situation in Boston was so inhospitable that he said artists retreated like

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shoemakers. So, Copley is clearly aware of the limitations of Boston, limitations of the colonies

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He's aware that portraiture which he does is a low form of art but

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he's also, i think in a way, very practical. he knows that this is what people want, and

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he's able to do it masterfully and beautifully

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but there is a lingering sense that he is not painting the grand history, and religious and mythological paintings

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of the European tradition and maybe cant compete on that level.

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so we have this beautiful and ambitious painting that situates John Singleton Copley in this very specific historical moment