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  • 18th Century American Painting
  • John Greene , circa 1769
  • oil on canvas
  • 49 1/8 in. x 39 1/2 in. (124.78 cm x 100.33 cm)
  • John Singleton Copley  (1738 - 1815)
  • American
  • Museum Purchase: Currier Funds, 1935.4
  • On View
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Interpretive text from Exploring American Art: An Online Resource for the American Collections

In commissioning John Singleton Copley to paint his portrait, the thirty-eight-year-old Boston merchant John Greene (1731-1781) sought the services of the most talented and successful painter in the city.  During the years preceding this portrait, Copley had painted such notable residents of Boston as Nicholas Boylston, John Hancock, and Joseph Warren;  his work was in such demand that he was able to command fourteen guineas for a three-quarter-length portrait such as this one.


Yet among Copley's sitters, John Greene was not an especially wealthy man-his  
income has been estimated at less than five hundred pounds a year.  Copley characterizes him as a man of affairs, showing him in a setting he used for many of the other businessmen he painted in the late 1760s.  As he had done with the fabulously wealthy Hancock in 1765, Copley posed Greene at a cloth-covered table, with a ledger and a pewter inkstand before him, his quill pen in his hand.  But here the ledgers are small, and the trappings of success are modest.  Greene sits in a simple Queen Anne chair, not an elaborately carved Chippendale; he wears neither a wig (the most expensive part of an eighteenth-century gentleman's costume, and thus an emblem of wealth) nor powder in his hair.  His suit, a blue frock coat with matching waistcoat and breeches, trimmed with gold braid, is handsome and fashionable, yet a far cry from the opulent brocades and velvets worn in the portraits of Nicholas Boylston, Nathaniel Sparhawk, and other extremely wealthy merchants of Greene's day.

Despite his relatively modest means, Greene was active as a philanthropist.  He was for many years a vestryman at Trinity Church in Boston and served as an administrator of the Greene Foundation, a fund for the support of assistant ministers of that church.  He was also an active member of the Charitable Society, a Boston social club dedicated to good works.  Copley suggests Greene's noble character by recording him with bright eyes and a genial expression; his posture-he sits erect and leans forward slightly in his chair-connotes a man of action and decision.  
Copley also painted Greene's wife, Catherine, in 1769 (Cleveland Museum of Art).  As was often the case in this era, the portraits were most likely conceived as a pair, yet husband and wife are not related by either setting or gesture.  John Greene is seated in the kind of imaginary interior Copley used for many male portraits, a space whose importance-and by association, the importance of the sitter-is suggested by the massive column and the swag of drapery behind the table.  In contrast, Catherine Greene stands before a fictional landscape, one hand at her face (to draw attention to her unbound hair, adorned with pearls and draped languorously across her shoulder), the other holding the silk wrap that forms the outer layer of her loosely draped gown.  Copley here follows eighteenth-century custom in associating the male with the world of business and the female with the world of nature; his perceptive characterization of John Greene and his sensuous rendering of Catherine elevate the portraits above the conventional.

CT


REFERENCE

Jules David Prown.  John Singleton Copley.  2 vols. Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1966.  Vol. 1, pp. 71-72.