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  • A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley by Jane Kamensky
  • Jennifer Van Horn
A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley. By Jane Kamensky. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2016. 540 pages. Cloth, paper, ebook.

Chances are that if you know an early American portrait, it was painted by John Singleton Copley: the hardworking Paul Revere, the stern Samuel Adams, the sensuous Margaret Kemble Gage, wife of General Thomas Gage. Their represented bodies, seemingly impervious to the ravages of time, have stood as reminders of a revolutionary epoch. Jane Kamensky's biography of Copley, A Revolution in Color, tells the story of these canvases and many others the painter created on both sides of the Atlantic in the decades surrounding the American Revolution. Kamensky interweaves treatments of Copley's art (first portraits, then history paintings) and a compelling tale of the artist's rise and fall amid the Atlantic conflicts that shaped his career. From his origins as a virtual autodidact who made a fortune painting Boston's elites, Copley fled the occupied city to become an eager art student relishing the sights of a grand tour. Finally reunited with his family in London, he achieved his long-delayed dream of becoming a history painter and—at least for a period—set the British art capital abuzz. Ultimately, however, the art market was too unsteady and public opinion too fickle for Copley to achieve lasting financial success. By illuminating the transatlantic nature of Copley's career and the transatlantic connections between his interlinked networks of family, friends, and patrons (before and after the war), Kamensky argues for early Americans' Atlantic orientation and undercuts the radicalness of America's revolution. She skillfully introduces these recent historiographical shifts to a broad audience. And in focusing her biography on one of the most well-studied American artists, she raises questions about the possibilities and power of crossing disciplinary divides.

A Revolution in Color brings an artist into the company of generals and politicians, the kinds of historical figures who have starred in recent popular biographies about early America and stimulated the reemergence of that genre as a means of attracting a wider readership. By focusing on a cultural producer, Kamensky profitably situates art making alongside battles and political protests as forces that shaped Americans' revolutionary years. Beginning with the title, A Revolution in Color, the process of representation suffuses all aspects of the book. The phrase joins viewers' visual imagination of the American Revolution, so dependent on Copley's renderings, to the artist's personal transformation when he moved from New England, dominated by black-and-white prints, to Europe, where he experienced the full chromatic glory of many painted canvases. Kamensky's visual allusions (to color, [End Page 170] scale, figure, and ground) drive the narrative and delight the reader; many sentences beg to be read aloud and savored.

Copley had a complicated involvement with the American Revolution, and Kamensky uses the artist to shift our understanding of that conflict. As she promises, "The American Revolution looks different seen through his eyes, looking west from London: a sidelong glance at a sideways war, the conflict that made and unmade him. The closer we get to such ambivalent characters . . . the more our easy verities about the period dissolve" (8). Focusing on the tumultuous quest for success of this "middling man" (5) allows Kamensky to build upon recent scholarship in American history that has both destabilized notions of the revolution as an idealistic victory and focused on the messy experiences of loyalists and laborers who suffered dislocations and financial hardships. Copley, unlike the ideologues he portrayed, was a pragmatist. At first a patriot sympathizer, he became, if not an outright loyalist, at least a contented expatriate. But at the end of his life he longed to make a fortune again in America, as Gilbert Stuart was then attempting. The ambiguity of the revolution, easy to overlook when focused on political or military leaders, comes to the fore in the experience of a professional artist who painted portraits of such elite men and their wives.

To claim Copley as a "middling" everyman, however, is...

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