John Singleton Copley in America [Hardcover]

Carrie Rebora Barratt (Author), Paul Staiti (Author), Carrie Rebora (Author)

Book Description

Series: Metropolitan Museum of Art Series | Publication Date: September 10, 1995

John Singleton Copley was the leading portraitist of the American colonial era. This volume, which accompanies a major exhibition of Copley's work organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, focuses on the paintings, miniatures and pastels which Copley produced before he moved to London in 1774. In four principal essays, a team of experts places Copley's work in historical and social context, and brings new critical methods to bear upon traditional aspects of the study of portraits and portraiture. Among the conclusions are that Copley's portraits helped to shape pre-Revolutionary culture, and that their content was market-driven in a relentlessly consumerist, anglophile society. Four shorter texts treat Copley's use of costumes in his portraits, his achievement as a miniaturist, his pastels, and the frames he used for his work. Catalogue entries on the colourplates detail the sitters' lives, decode the emblematic language that reflected status in colonial society, and reveal the way Copley contrived to enhance his subjects' status. The exhibition with which the book is timed to coincide opens in June 1995 in Boston and in September 1995 in New York, and travels subsequently to Houston and Milwaukee.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Copley was an American painting original, producing several hundred portraits of well-to-do Bostonian colonials. Some canvasses are widely recognized, as of patriots Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, or John Hancock, but the Copley corpus is what fascinates art historians for its window on the merchant class in prerevolutionary society. As a purveyor to that class, Copley produced miniatures, pastels, and crayons, and even frames at various rates (one writer here reprints his bills). Viewers at this distance prefer his best work in oils, however, which the authors critique for their antecedent sources and the contemporary fashions they depict; Copley's images of costumery clothe the self-assured nonchalance his subjects wished to convey, and his best portraits (as of the Boylston siblings) are magnetic. The Copley exhibition appears this fall in New York, Boston, Milwaukee, and Houston. If libraries there and elsewhere wish to splurge, this informative and glossy album should please many. Gilbert Taylor --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art (September 10, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300086318
• ISBN-13: 978-0300086317
• Product Dimensions: 12.3 x 9.9 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,302,852 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)