A Revolution in Color

Starred review from July 1, 2016
A majestic portrait of the American painter.Kamensky (History/Harvard Univ.; The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America's First Banking Collapse, 2008, etc.) delivers a masterful portrayal of John Singleton Copley (1738-1815), a "cautious man in a rash age," his story "peculiarly American: hard-edged, uncloaked, impolite." The author beautifully merges biography with history to tell the story of one of America's earliest and finest portrait painters. Along the way, she provides insightful profiles of many of Copley's key contemporaries, including Benjamin West and Joshua Reynolds. Born into a poor Boston household, Copley seemed destined to draw and paint. When his mother married a second time, to a portrait painter, Copley was able to take advantage of his new father's skills and materials to teach himself to paint. It was his calling, and his business as a supremely gifted portrait painter of local businessmen and British officers took off. In the 1750s, his craft improved, with "fabrics that shimmered, almost rustled; eyes that seemed to have mind, even spirit behind them." By 1764, he was experimenting with full-scale portraits. He painted the impressive A Boy with a Flying Squirrel in 1765, with his brother as the model. His portrait of John Hancock followed, and in 1768, he painted an iconic masterpiece, Paul Revere. At the time, Britain was relentlessly taxing items, including "painters colours," and passing repressive acts. As a loyalist, Copley kept his politics quiet, but after the Boston Tea Party in 1773, he feared for his family. He sailed to England in 1774, never to return. He began painting large historical paintings, but, as Kamensky writes, "his insight diminished." After signing the Treaty of Paris, John Adams sat for Copley in London for a portrait. Shortly after, Copley died "beneath a mountain of debts." An ocean away, the painter's halting rebirth began. There may never be a better biography of Copley than this sumptuous, exquisitely told story of a man and his time.

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Starred review from September 1, 2016
John Singleton Copley's finest works were his portraits, and Kamensky (The Exchange Artist, 2008) portrays the portraitist with the literary equivalent of his visual expressiveness with color, detail, and emotional discernment. She brings us into Copley's volatile world, beginning with his humble boyhood home in colonial Boston, where ocean winds delivered both commerce and war. Responsible, at age 13, for his twice-widowed mother and half-brother, Copley, as ambitious and diligent as he was gifted, taught himself to paint in a virtual aesthetic vacuum, securing enough commissions by age 20 to buy property. Kamensky traces the narrow line Copley walked as he painted both British officials and fervent patriots, including Paul Revere, a balancing act that became exponentially more dire when he married the daughter of a tea merchant at the height of the riotous protests against British taxation. Copley holds steady, shipping paintings to London in pursuit of critical guidance, only to be told that he must see Europe's masterworks. With the War of Independence brewing at home, Copley tours Italy and settles in London, where he assiduously creates astonishingly intricate paintings, from elegant portraits of the elite and his own loving family to enormous epic dramas, including Watson and the Shark and The Death of Major Peirson. Kamensky, whose avidly inquisitive immersions in each mesmerizing canvas double our appreciation for Copley's achievements, observes that the artist chased both soaring grandeur and earthbound fidelity. Richly resourced, prismatic, dynamic, factually and psychologically revelatory, and ebulliently spiked with political insights and ironies, Kamensky's biography provides an intimate view of the American Revolution and its immediate aftermath as seen through the acute, penetrating gaze of a masterful artist at work in the thick of it.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)