Copley and the Case of the Blue Dress

Figures

Figure 1.

John Singleton Copley (1738–1815), Mrs. Benjamin Pickman (Mary Toppan, 1744–1817), 1763. Oil on canvas; H. 50”, W. 40”. Yale University Art Gallery; bequest of Edith Malvina K. Wetmore.

In 1763, when the Boston painter, John Singleton Copley painted the portrait of Mrs. Benjamin Pickman that now hangs in the Yale Art Gallery he was twenty-five and she was nineteen (figure 1). ¹ Almost life size, her youthful image appears, despite the unfamiliar material world which she inhabits, immediate and present to us.

They came from decidedly different worlds. Copley was the son of Irish immigrants (his father was a tobacco seller on Boston’s wharves) who had, with the brief tutelage of a stepfather, effectively taught himself how to paint and how to deport himself among the gentry. ² In the eighteenth century it was necessary for an artist to assume the guise of gentleman in order to pursue his profession. Succinctly put by contemporary theorist Jonathan Richardson: “as his business is chiefly with people of condition, he must think as a gentleman.” ³ And, for a painter, the custom of “people of condition” was all there was, portraits being the sole genre flourishing in the colonies before the Revolution. Copley did not balk at this role. In 1769 he married a woman of considerable fortune and, with the assistance of his father-in-law, bought property on the edge of Boston Common adjacent to the mansion of John Hancock. ⁴ Here he hoped to consolidate his achievements and attract patrons, for in the eighteenth century a householder’s home was his place of business as well as his residence. ⁵

Copley was still a bachelor and less smartly situated when he painted Mrs. Pickman but we may nevertheless imagine a suitably upscale site where the painter minutely observed and recorded the figure, face, accoutrements, and the shimmering blue dress of the handsome heiress on a canvas supported on an easel before him. But understanding Copley’s studio process, his intellectual process, and the end product as a legible social text may not be as transparent as it may seem. What did he see, and, perhaps more important, how did he see? What role did period concepts of art, of sources of knowledge, of family, of individual identity, and of material evidences of a global economy play in establishing what the young Copley saw and therefore rendered?

Copley’s sitter, the newly-married Mrs. Pickman, had spent her first nineteen years as Mary Toppan, daughter and sole surviving heir of Bezaleel Toppan, physician and ship owner of Salem who had died in 1762 with an estate valued at £2500. ⁶ Within twelve months she married, produced an heir for Benjamin Pickman, and sat for her portrait, designed to hang en suite in their Salem home with the portrait Copley had painted a few years earlier of her husband (also at Yale).

The son of a kinswoman painted in 1763 gives us some insight into Copley’s studio process: “[He] painted a very beautiful head of my mother who told me that she sat to him fifteen or sixteen times! Six hours at a time!! and that once she had been sitting to him for many hours, when he left the room for a few minutes, but requested that she would not move from her seat during his absence. She had the curiosity, however, to peep at the picture and to her astonishment, she found it all rubbed out.” ⁷ The exclamation points in this account suggest the truly extraordinary nature of the time Copley required to paint a standard half-length (50” x 40”) canvas. ⁸ His contemporary, Sir Joshua Reynolds in London, told an inquiring potential patron, “It requires in general three sittings, about an hour and a half each time but if the sitter chooses it the face could be begun and finished in one day. It is divided into separate times for the convenience of the person who sits. When the face is finished the rest is done without...