History at Columbia University, where he taught for more than thirty years. Prior to Columbia he worked at the Frick Collection in New York and as an assistant curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His engagement with Benjamin West began in Philadelphia with an article about an oil sketch by West, published in the museum’s bulletin in 1965. In 1975 he took on the task of completing the monumental catalogue of West’s paintings begun by the late Helmut von Erffa, which led him to think about the artist’s influence upon the work of his compatriot and exact contemporary Copley. The book, after a decade’s labour, saw publication in 1986. His other significant books are The PreRaphaelite Landscape, published in 1973 with a second edition in 2001, and The New Painting of the 1860s: Between the Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetic Movement, published in 2011, both products of long-standing love and study of English Victorian painting. In addition to
Copley and West in England 1775–1815
Allen Staley is Professor Emeritus of Art
Copley and West in England 1775–1815
lovers of the art of both countries. West and Copley have always and properly been viewed as the two pre-eminent eighteenth-century American artists, despite the fact that, at the age of twenty-one, West left his native shores in 1760, never to return. He went on to become immensely successful in England, becoming, among other things, the second president of the Royal Academy of Arts. Copley spent half his working life also in England. However, before making the move across the Atlantic, he made his mark as an exceptionally talented artist, who, without any real training, painted likenesses of fellow Bostonians, including ones of figures such as John Hancock and Paul Revere, that have become icons of American history. While those portraits remain his most widely admired works, after 1775 and his resettling in England, he started painting distinctly different types of pictures, initially showing modern historical subjects in emulation of the model provided him by West, following, for example, West’s celebrated Death of General Wolfe, exhibited in 1771, with his own Death of the Earl of Chatham, begun in 1779. For a time, the two expatriate Americans had a close working relationship, that we can see substantially reflected in both the formal language and the subject matter of many of their best works, but it eventually and inevitably turned into rivalry.
writing countless reviews and articles – the first in The Burlington Magazine in 1963 – he has organized or shared in organizing and writing
Allen Staley
the catalogues of numerous exhibitions.
This beautifully and thoroughly illustrated book, which constitutes the first serious investigation of the relationship between Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley, will be of considerable interest to both British and American art historians, and appeal to
The book begins with a brief prologue discussing the earliest of West’s depictions of recent historical events and of subjects set in America, painted prior to Copley’s arrival in England. It then follows the year-by-year evolution of Copley’s painting from 1775 to his death in 1815, with an underlying focus upon his ongoing give-and-take with West, and it ends with examination of hitherto little-known and unstudied major late paintings, from after 1800, by both artists.
Allen Staley
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Copley and West in England 1775–1815
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Allen Staley
Copley and West in England 1775–1815
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Published in 2021 by The Burlington Press
Copyright © 2021 Burlington Magazine Publications Limited Text copyright © Allen Staley All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any storage or retrieval system, without the prior permission in writing from the copyright holder and publisher. Allen Staley has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. ISBN 978-1-9162378-0-3 (hbk) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Published and distributed by The Burlington Press Burlington Magazine Publications Limited 14–16 Duke’s Road, London, 1 9 www.burlington.org.uk Edited and designed by The Burlington Magazine Printed and bound in the UK by Gwasg Gomer, 33–35 Lammas Street, Carmarthen 31 3 Wales The publication of this book has been made possible by generous support from The Burlington Magazine Foundation (UK) and the Burlington Magazine Foundation Inc. (New York, New York, USA)
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Contents
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Introduction
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Abbreviated Citations
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Prologue: Benjamin West: 1763–1775
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1. Copley and West: 1775–1778
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2. Copley and West: 1778–1800
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3. Copley and West: 1800–1815
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Coda
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Bibliography
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Acknowledgements
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Index
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Introduction
T
his book is about the work of two artists, John Singleton Copley and Benjamin West, and, to a lesser degree, the personal and professional interactions that lay behind that work. It is more about Copley than it is about West, and its main subject is Copley’s painting as it evolved in the years between 1775, when he settled in England, and his death in 1815. Copley has long been viewed as the pre-eminent American painter of the eighteenth century, on the basis of the portraits he painted of his fellow citizens of Boston in the years leading up to the outbreak of the American revolutionary war and his departure from America in 1774. That distinguished body of work falls outside the scope of this investigation, as do, except for a handful of significant exceptions, the many portraits he subsequently painted in London. The book looks instead at the other types of picture he began to paint upon establishing what was in effect a second career in 1775. He, of course, did see, study and respond in many ways to the English and European art that he encountered first only in 1774–5, but I believe that the relationship between West and Copley – which started with a letter West wrote in 1766 upon seeing a painting his compatriot had sent from Boston to be exhibited in London, and lasted for almost half a century – played the most fundamental role, and a more pervasive role than has usually been recognized, in shaping the latter’s English paintings, as I hope that the consideration of the two artists’ works in the following pages will demonstrate. While a few of Copley’s English works, Watson and the Shark most notably, have become deservedly well known, an earlier generation of American art historians by and large paid little heed to his later paintings. The publication in 1966 of Jules Prown’s two-volume study of Copley, based upon his Harvard dissertation begun some eight years previously, changed that by inaugurating a new phase in understanding and appreciating the artist’s work. Containing a ‘Checklist’ of Copley’s American pictures in volume one and a more thorough ‘Catalogue’ of
the English ones in volume two, it remains, more than half a century later, the authoritative study, upon which all serious attention to the artist continues to rely. Volume two, subtitled ‘In England 1774–1815’, provides the foundation upon which the present examination of Copley’s and West’s paintings from those years is based, and I have relied upon it absolutely. Nevertheless, since 1966 there has been what amounts to a revolution in the study of English art, and a vast increase in our knowledge of the artists alongside whom Copley worked in the years 1775–1815, not least among them Benjamin West. What we have learned from subsequent scholarship in no way invalidates what Prown had to say, but it allows a perspective impossible in 1966, and in the present endeavour I try to take advantage of that perspective. Jules Prown himself played a central role in bringing about that new and larger perspective. Prior to 1966, most American scholars paid even less attention to Benjamin West than to Copley, seeing his works painted in England as alien products, not truly belonging to the history of American art at all, while the English dismissed him as American. But Prown, in studying Copley, came into contact with the late Helmut von Erffa, who had started working on a complete catalogue of West’s paintings in the 1940s. Sadly, von Erffa’s health was beginning to fail before he was able to complete the undertaking (he died in 1979), and, as that became apparent, Jules persuaded the Barra Foundation to support the completion and publication of von Erffa’s work (which finally happened in 1986), taking it upon himself to find someone (myself ) to see it through. For that and for his continuing engagement and assistance with that venture I owe him my personal gratitude. Jules also became a student of West in his own right, publishing important essays and articles about him. Furthermore, beyond Copley and West, Jules played a central role in what I have described as a revolution in the study of English art. That revolution was initiated by the generosity of Paul Mellon, whose gift of his collection of British
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art to Yale University in 1966 led to the subsequent creations of the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven and what has become the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London. Jules, who had been a member of the Yale faculty since 1961, became the founding director of the Yale Center, built to house the collection, and of the nascent Paul Mellon Centre, which, as re-established in London in 1971, has been responsible for a stream of major publications devoted to British art, among them the seventeen-volume Diary of Joseph Farington, our chief source regarding the strains between West and Copley in their later life. In the years following the publication of the West catalogue, the most significant publications devoted to the English years of the two artists have been a pair of catalogues of exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, organized by the museum’s Curator of American Paintings, Emily Ballew Neff: John Singleton Copley in England (1995–6) and American Adversaries: West and Copley in a Transatlantic World (2013–14). As befitted serious university-press books back in 1966, Prown’s two volumes were abundantly illustrated, but only in black and white; so the many large colour plates in these two catalogues have allowed us to see in a way hitherto impossible many of the works he had brought to our attention. The more recent and more splendidly illustrated American Adversaries: West and Copley in a Transatlantic World, while full of fascinating and significant information about the content of the pictures, does not concern itself with more formalist questions of the sort I consider here, but the earlier John Singleton Copley in England, although ostensibly only about Copley (and published in the same year with what was effectively a companion catalogue for a larger exhibition, John Singleton Copley in America, organized by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and shown together with Copley in England in Houston in 1996), contains a perceptive essay by William Pressly
about Copley’s art in the years after 1775 and West’s influence upon it. Subsequent American scholarship, as embodied in Jane Kamensky’s biography of Copley and Paul Staiti’s more wide-ranging Of Arms and Artists: The American Revolution through Painters’ Eyes, both published in 2016, has tended to focus more upon the historical context of the artists’ activities than upon the paintings themselves. This book has grown out of my work done some forty years ago on the West catalogue, which led me to think about some of the affinities between West’s and Copley’s paintings. Shifting my focus to the latter, the present work looks at the relationship between the two artists as manifested in such affinities, formal and thematic: both in style and in subject. While I try, first of all, to look carefully and closely at West’s and Copley’s pictures, I consider also factors such as patronage, royal and otherwise, or lack thereof, which shaped their different professional trajectories; and, on occasion, I cite works by artists other than West who, I believe, had significant impact upon Copley’s art. I should also point out here that I try to pay due attention to Copley’s late paintings, and in doing so I depart from the model otherwise provided me by Jules Prown, who in 1966 saw the late works only as sad reflections of the aging artist’s failing powers, and squeezed everything he did after 1800 into a single, short chapter titled ‘The Final Years’. That view has informed most recent attention to the artist. The exhibition Copley in England in 1995–6 included only two works from after 1800, both portraits, and the subsequent American Adversaries in 2013, almost nothing from later than 1787. I believe, nevertheless, that Copley continued to paint ambitious and interesting – although not always entirely successful – pictures that deserve our attention, right up to the last year of his life. The dialogue with West also continued, and that dialogue between the two Americans, which had been going on since 1766, is in its various manifestations a leitmotiv of this study, if not quite its main subject.
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