JOHN COPLEY: Painter by Necessity

MOST painters, inspired at first by the work of others, find their way by imitating what they have seen on canvas. A remarkable exception was John Singleton Copley (1738-1815). who found his way by himself. Copley was inspired by simple necessity, and imitated nature instead of art. The astonishing result: he painted better pictures than any American before him, and possibly since. Even more extraordinary is the fact that he painted better pictures than he had ever seen.

At 13, Copley became head of his family upon the death of his stepfather, a mediocre mezzotint artist and dancing teacher who had barely introduced the boy to art. To help support his mother and half brother, Copley had to translate this bowing acquaintance into professional skill. His response to the challenge was heroic.

Models, Not Modes

A solemn, plump, tightfisted and deceptively timorous little fellow, Copley at once set up shop as a portrait painter. At first he borrowed poses and tony backgrounds from his step father's mezzotints, and tricks of color and modeling from his elders in Boston's portrait-painting fraternity. But he soon found he could go farther by paying scant attention to the modes and strict attention to his models. He thought nothing of spending 100 hours on a portrait, advanced as much by elbow grease as by genius. Early in his career he reached a pedestrian conclusion that lent wings to his art: he decided that his paintings were "almost always good in proportion to the time I give them, provided I have a subject that is picturesque." As John Adams wrote of Copley's portraits, "You can scarcely help discoursing with them, asking questions and receiving answers." Paul Revere at His Workbench (see cut) is a case in point. Copley was in his 20s when he portrayed his friend Revere, the silversmith, and he had already reached the peak.

As if to demonstrate his powers, he deliberately invited technical difficulties, multiplying close harmonies of the flesh, pleated linen and polished silver, and tilting the teapot in the hand.

Yet the overall effect is sympathetic, not showy. Copley had figured out how to paint what he saw, and what he saw was not merely a subject for his brush but a real human being.

Revere glances up with the startled yet stubborn expression of Bob Hope. The patriot appears to be in the grip of some over riding idea -- and the observer is tempted to ask about it.

Before he reached 35, Copley was a rich man, with three houses and 20 acres of land on Beacon Hill, and a Tory heiress wife. His humble beginnings and high achievements gave him friends on both sides of the political fence.

He made a brave try at mediating between them during the Boston Tea Party, was almost mobbed for his pains. His thoughts turned to the home country he had never seen and the greater glory to be gained there. On the eve of the Revolution, Copley (who hewed to the opinion that political contests are "neither pleasing to an artist or advantageous to the art itself") set sail for England. He left behind a gallery of American portraits destined to live, amaze and inspire as long as paint holds to canvas.

Four years after he went to London, Copley painted his great Brook Watson and the Shark (see color). The painting was commissioned by Merchant Watson himself, to commemorate a leg lost in a ship's accident in Havana Harbor. Copley used newly acquired techniques in putting the picture together: instead of painting directly from models, he began with sketches of the single figures and then combined their movements as as a choreographer.

Pity, Not Mist

The canvas is monumental in composition, dramatic in detail. It speaks--screams--of fate's flashing changes. An ordinary man overboard suddenly confronts the jaws of death. No softening atmosphere mists the facts. No historical, mythologic or literary connotations blur the issue. For sheer pity and terror, the picture stands alone in its age, when art either eulogized, moralized or titillated.

Copley had invented Romantic horror-painting, but he never followed up his invention. That remained for Frenchman Theodore Gericault, whose Raft of the Medusa (see color) came 40 years later. Critics have made much of what Gericault owed to Michelangelo and Caravaggio, have tended to overlook his connection with Copley. Yet the similarity of composition (a pyramid tilted toward the horizon) and especially of spirit argues for Gericault's having known Copley's picture. Splendid though they are. both Copley's and Gericault's men-against-the-sea-scapes seem as dated today as they once were startling.

The swift, accurate camera has superceded such labored reconstructions, as photographs of the Andrea Doria disaster show.

Brook Watson and the Shark was Copley's only real contribution to European art. Actually the work of his London peers (Romney. Gainsborough. Reynolds, West) corrupted Copley's homespun realism. To compete in such fast and fashionable company, the old dog learned a pathetic array of new tricks. He kept on painting industriously until his death at 77, but his ice-clear eye gradually veiled, his granite-firm hand practiced soft flamboyance, his powers slipped away like spirits bored with too much worldliness, sick of success.

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