John Singleton Copley: America's First Great Artist

by Robert Plate

Plate, Robert, John Singleton America's First Great Artist

Hardcover

First published June 1, 1969

Reviews

[Donna · Rating 3 out of 5]

John Singleton Copley was a Boston man who began his art career before the Revolutionary War. He was a highly successful portraitist, but his ambition to become a great painter led him to Europe and he eventually settled in London.

The structure was sometimes too melodramatic, and it wasn't necessary to remind me for the fiftieth time that Copley tried his hardest to avoid politics. This book was at its best when it placed Copley in the middle of the tensions leading up to the Declaration of Independence, and its description of the financial and artistic decline of his final years was genuinely sad.

I was excited to see that there was an entire chapter named for my favorite painting, Watson and the Shark, so it was a bit of a let down to find that the chapter had only a couple of pages on that subject. While I'd have preferred to read more about Watson, my disappointment was somewhat tempered by the author's use of the word "highfalutin."