John Singleton Copley: Translator of Historical Story and Heroic Character into Pictorial Form

Copley was “the” portrait painter of the American Revolution during the Romantic period of the history of art. He captured the shrewdness of character of our iconic American forefathers and foremothers in pairing the grand portraiture of English style with exacting authentic detail of his Dutch contemporaries. His portraits conveyed “the plain, exulted vision” of the young Republic in search of a style in which antiquity was American’s destiny.