In this life of painter John Singleton Copley, Jane Kamensky untangles the web of principles and interests that shaped the age of America’s revolution. Copley’s talent earned him the patronage of Boston’s leaders but he did not share their politics and painting portraits failed to satisfy his lofty artistic goals. A British subject who lamented America’s provincialism, Copley looked longingly across the Atlantic. When resistance escalated into war, he was in London. A painter of America’s revolution as Britain’s American War, the magisterial canvases he created made him one of the towering figures of the British art scene. Kamensky brings Copley’s world alive and explores the fraught relationships between liberty and slavery, family duty and personal ambition, legacy and posterity—tensions that characterised the era of the American Revolution and that beset us still.
- ISBN10 0393354865
- ISBN13 9780393354867
- Publish Date 21 November 2017 (first published 4 October 2016)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint WW Norton & Co
- Format Paperback
- Pages 544
- Language English