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

John Singleton Copley, A Boy with a Flying Squirrel (Henry Pelham), 1765, 77.15 x 63.82 cm / 30-3/8 x 25-1/8 inches (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

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

So, imagine wanting to be an artist,

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

and no one who wants to buy serious paintings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and they so beautifully and loosely hold that gold chain.

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

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

meet with the white coat of his belly

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

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

that just plays beautifully alternating against itself

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

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

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

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

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

But it was portraits that people wanted in new American cities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

but also genre paintings where scenes of everyday life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

he's able to do it masterfully and beautifully

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

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

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