John Singleton Copley Picture Study Aid and Art Prints

John Singleton Copley Picture Study

I’ve mentioned before that I really enjoy portraiture and have a soft spot for realist-style art, so I enjoyed exploring Copley’s work. I found it interesting that while he was attempting to make a name for himself as an artist by appealing to the British, traveling throughout Europe and eventually staying in England, his country of birth was attempting to make a name for herself as an independent nation by fighting against the British.

In 1765, at the age of twenty-seven, Copley sent his “Boy with a Flying Squirrel” (which is one of the pieces included in this Picture Study Aid) to London to be shown at an exhibition for the Society of Artists and received the following feedback:

In May 1766 the art critic for the London Chronicle remarked that “a Boy with a Flying Squirrel” by Copley was “very clever” and that “with proper application, there is no doubt of his making a good painter.” A few months later Copley received two letters bearing the news that the British reaction to his work was generally favorable. In one, his friend Captain R. G. Bruce, who had transported the painting to London for him, quoted the opinion rendered by [Sir Joshua] Reynolds, the leading English portraitist of the day. Reynolds said “that in any collection of painting it will pass for an excellent Picture, but considering the Dissadvantages…you had laboured under, that it was a very wonderfull Performance,” despite “a little Hardness in the Drawing, Coldness in the Shakes, An over minuteness.” He maintained further that the young American could become “one of the first Painters in the World” provided that he come to study in Europe “before [his] Manner and Taste were corrupted or fixed by working in [his] little way at Boston.”

(FROM JOHN SINGLETON COPLEY IN AMERICA BY CARRIE REBORA, P. 215)

And while I do think it’s important to learn about great artists and study their work regardless of where they’re from, I’m glad that later American painters did not feel the need to impress the people across the pond in order to gain legitimacy as artists!

The intention of this picture study aid is to equip the home educator with some basic facts and understanding of John Singleton Copley and a sampling of his works. It is not meant to be an exhaustive analysis or study of each piece or a complete biography of the artist.

About picture study, Ms. Mason recommended keeping learning as simple as possible, especially in the younger years, and put extra emphasis on the images by themselves.

There is no talk about schools of painting, little about style; consideration of these matters comes in later life, the first and most important thing is to know the pictures themselves. As in a worthy book we leave the author to tell his own tale, so do we trust a picture to tell its tale through the medium the artist gave it. In the region of art as else-where we shut out the middleman. (vol 6 pg 216)

Definite teaching is out of the question; suitable ideas are easily given, and a thoughtful love of Art inspired by simple natural talk over the picture at which the child is looking. (PR Article “Picture Talks”)

…we begin now to understand that art is not to be approached by such an acadamised road. It is of the spirit, and in ways of the spirit must we make our attempt. We recognise that the power of appreciating art and of producing to some extent an interpretation of what one sees is as universal as intelligence, imagination, nay, speech, the power of producing words. But there must be knowledge and, in the first place, not the technical knowledge of how to produce, but some reverent knowledge of what has been produced; that is, children should learn pictures, line by line, group by group, by reading, not books, but pictures themselves. A friendly picture-dealer supplies us with half a dozen beautiful little reproductions of the work of some single artist, term by term. After a short story of the artist’s life and a few sympathetic words about his trees or his skies, his river-paths or his figures, the little pictures are studied one at a time; that is, children learn, not merely to see a picture but to look at it, taking in every detail.” (vol 6 pg 214)

This Picture Study Aid is meant to offer basic information about the artists as well as ready answers should your student ask about a particular aspect of a piece and the explanation isn’t readily evident. Ms. Mason emphasized not focusing on strict academic discourse when doing picture study, but rather simply exposing students to the art itself:

His education should furnish him with whole galleries of mental pictures, pictures by great artists old and new;––…––in fact, every child should leave school with at least a couple of hundred pictures by great masters hanging permanently in the halls of his imagination, to say nothing of great buildings, sculpture, beauty of form and colour in things he sees. Perhaps we might secure at least a hundred lovely landscapes too,––sunsets, cloudscapes, starlight nights. At any rate he should go forth well furnished because imagination has the property of magical expansion, the more it holds the more it will hold. (vol 6 pg 43)