The Straddling Man
MELLOW, JAMES R.
ON ART By James R. Mellow The Straddling Man How confidently Copley's people look out at us over a span of 200 years! A gallery of American originals-shrewd merchants, Boston matrons,...
...With it, he was able to capture and exalt both the fiery ardor of his Yankee contemporaries and the benign civility of his Tory friends...
...Yet Copley is a problematic figure in American painting...
...but that his untenable situation should have been the cause of greatness in those last American portraits...
...It is touching to read (in the catalogue for the Copley exhibition which, having already been seen in New York, now moves on to Boston) Mrs...
...Once the War was over, Stuart, Trumbull and Earl worked their separate ways back into the national fold...
...Copley, however, remained abroad...
...Copley longed for the grand style, but his patrons saw his profession as little more than carpentering or shoemaking-a necessary craft in a diligent community...
...Copley reflected the next day, "what if Mr...
...The current exhibition, which includes 103 paintings and sketches evenly divided between his British and American phases, does not quite bear out this reading with all the swift justice of a morality play...
...In dealing with his life, the single most embarrassing fact is his flight to Europe on the eve of the American Revolution...
...but in straddling the fence, he toppled over onto the wrong side...
...Before 1755, Copley's paintings are in the stiff, formal manner of most New England primitives...
...Copley was not unique among the artists of his time in leaving for England...
...his family joined him...
...Thomas Mifflin looks intense and thoughtful, his finger marking his place in a slender book...
...There, they managed to eke out whatever success was possible for an American artist of the period...
...His good offices at court, his school, his example as the first American painter to make an impression on the international scene, were attractions for the small band of Americans who, more or less sympathetic to the rebel cause, still found it useful to sit it out in London while improving upon their art...
...the second, lived out in London, painting grand historical epics and portraits of the English peerage...
...As the foremost portrait painter in America, his clientele included radicals like John Hancock, Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, as well as the Tories Bowers, Fluckers and Verplancks...
...How starved he was for the lessons of Europe, and how quickly he was able to put them to use, one can see from the marked improvement in his painting after the arrival in Boston of the English painter Joseph Blackburn...
...No less an authority than Sir Joshua Reynolds (who had seen one of Copley's early portraits in London) had counseled the American painter to give up working in his "little way in Boston" and to reach out for the European experience before his taste and manner were corrupted...
...but they are part of a well-oiled tradition of patronage swept away by a new order...
...Within three years, he could produce a blue satin waistcoat or a bit of lace with a facility that Blackburn never approached...
...In June, he set out for England and the Continent...
...She looks for all the world as if she has just made some tart comment about Copley's Tory friends and is now waiting, inquisitively, for the reply...
...His ambivalence and the impossibility of his position had honed his sensibilities into an instrument of marvelous scrupulosity and tact...
...Among the later portraits, there are several (Midshipman Augustus Brine, Mrs...
...Charles Startin, Richard, Earl Howe) which equal his best American work...
...Married to the daughter of Richard Clarke, agent for the East India Company and one of the consignees of the tea which was dumped into Boston Harbor, Copley was placed in the unenviable position of acting as gobetween for his father-in-law and the radical leaders...
...In France, on the eve of a different revolution, Fragonard is painting the careless abandon of the ancien r?©gime and Greuze is sentimentalizing over nymphets and spilled milk...
...At 71, she has settled a good many questions in her own mind, has buried an industrious husband, raised 11 children...
...The irony, however, is not that he left behind, in a series of masterpieces, a superb document of the society he forfeited...
...Copley, uncertain of his chances abroad, remained at home for several more years...
...Copley's fate was not heroic...
...This technique and his sharp eye for character have yet to be equalled by any American painter...
...It is not until a century later that we get the modern exemplar of the politically oriented artist-Courbet, with his Socialist beliefs, painting in prison and exile...
...Eakins' portraits-melancholy, affecting, humane-have a sense of ordinary sadness...
...Yet, there is a gradual and irrevocable falling off in quality...
...There are few artists, before Copley's time, upon whom the force of political events impinged in such a direct and personal way...
...The tragedy of Copley's career is that his esthetic predicament should so exactly coincide with his political dilemma...
...Benjamin West, as historical painter to King George III, was already established in England at the outbreak of the Revolution...
...His lack of fervor was redeemed somewhat by a brief stay in a British prison on the suspicion of being an American spy...
...instead, he was met with critical rebuffs and financial worries...
...I must either have given up a friend to the insult of a Mob or had my house pulled down and perhaps my family murthered...
...Sylvanus Bourne (born Mercy Gorham), dressed in lustrous satin, puts down her book and turns her frank gaze in our direction...
...His livelihood depended upon a society which was splitting down the middle over a political issue...
...It is the issue which every commentator feels pressed to acknowledge, excuse, or explain away...
...The full life commends his robust frame...
...Mrs...
...Watson had stayed (as I pressed him to) to spend the night...
...A gallery of American originals-shrewd merchants, Boston matrons, radical politicians-they wear their selfassurance like suits of new clothes...
...his default was conditioned by his artistic situation...
...His large historical compositions (The Death of Major Pierson, The Death of the Earl of Chatham) do have all the stilted drama typical of the genre, but they are competently done and it is doubtful that he could have carried them off with the same assurance had he remained in Boston...
...Nothing in American painting, before or since, matches Copley's performance in these portraits from the decade before the Revolution...
...Her eyes have a malicious gleam...
...It is also the issue which most colors any evaluation of the two halves of Copley's career: the first spent in Boston, recording Colonial society...
...When the Revolution began, several Americans-later to make their reputations as chroniclers of that great event-took up a vantage point on the opposite side of the Atlantic...
...Self-educated, in a country without vital cultural traditions, Copley had to forge his style from meager resources-English mezzotints, a copy of a Titian Venus, the chance encounter with an artist trained abroad...
...Sargent's, full of brio and superficial dash, have the false glamor of worldly aspirations...
...Joseph Sherbourne, in a damask dressing gown and turban, leans casually upon a table, pondering some remark...
...With some writers, one might almost believe that any candor about Copley's political defection would compromise his standing as the first great painter in American history...
...Ralph Earl, a lesser-known painter of Connecticut Yankees and Revolutionary heroes, deserted his wife and children for the security of the English capital...
...A mob turned up in front of his house, searching for the Loyalist George Watson...
...John Trumbull, whose historic scenes decorate the Capitol rotunda, was the proverbial sunshine patriot...
...Later, in the spring of 1774, he was given an even more forcible demonstration of the angry temper of American patriots...
...the psychological probity is too often replaced by mannered effects...
...A successful businessman, he has managed three wives and married off his only daughter to a prosperous Tory...
...His position was settled...
...Eleazer Tyng, wrinkled and spry, as soberly dressed as befits a man in his 80s, straightens himself up in his chair to give us a critical inspection...
...Gilbert Stuart, who afterward made a career of grinding out portraits of the Father of Our Country, took up residence in London in 1775...
...Copley's letter to her daughter: "Your father often regrets that he did not [return to America] many years since, but these retrospects are vain...
...The long-delayed trip abroad seemed the advisable solution to his problem...
...The style becomes brisk and flashy...
...How odd that with the gathering political crisis, the very prominence of his art should have forced him to a decision...
...Mifflin, straight as a ramrod, wears a mouse-colored gown with a homely bouquet pinned to her breast...
...The Thomas Mifflins, pert young radical upstarts, bright as pennies, have journeyed up from Philadelphia to sit to John Singleton Copley...
...Within the year the War broke out...
...Having enlisted in the Revolutionary Army, he resigned midway through the War (because of a minor error in the dating of his commission) and headed for London to study with West...
...Neither have Copley's vivacity or gift for taking people at their worth...
...His view had been that political contests were "neither pleasing to an artist or advantageous to the Art itself...
...It is customary to see Copley's later work as a sad decline, the just reward for his desertion of the American muse...
...Copley's later years did not bring him the fame or fortune he hoped to secure...
...The discrepancy between Copley's professed American sympathies and his London location is the crucial point...
...In Copley's society, however, there was no position for the artist other than as a portrait painter...
Vol. 49 • January 1966 • No. 1
