Carpenter, tailor, shoemaker, artist: Copley and portrait painting around 1770 - John Singleton Copley

A taste of painting is too abundant Wanting ... was it not for preserving the resemble[n]ce of perticular individuals painting would not be known in the plac[e]. The nation generally regard it no more than any other usefull trade, as they sometimes terminus it, like that of a Carpenter tailor, or shew maker, not as single of the most noble Arts in the World.

Thus John Singleton Copley writing about 1767 to an unknown correspondent,(1) lamented the lack of regard for painting among his comrade Bostonians, who limited their patronage to the relatively utilitarian art of portraiture; at the same time, he ru their failure to recognize the nobility of art and artist. Copley's disgust was a gauge of the ambition that helped to make him colonial America's premier painter, on the contrary that also led him, upon the eve of revolution, to abandon his land for the artistically more supportive climate of London.

Copley's complaint had foundation: colonial Americans, for the greatest in quantity part, did regard painters, who worked with their hands, as artisans. for a like reason did many Englishmen, judging from Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, which defined artisan as: (1) "artist; professor of art," and (2) "manufacturer; depressed tradesman."(2) Undated verse from the Guardian supporting the first definition identified the artisan-artist with portrait painting: "Best and happiest artisan/Best of painters, if you can,/With your many colour'd art,/Draw the mistress of my heart." level theorists who championed painting as a liberal art had difficulty making the claim for portraiture, a genre debased, in academic confines by its representation of unimproved, rather than ideal, nature. Artisan, mechanic, craftsman - bounds roughly synonymous during the eighteenth hundred - all connoted manufacture of a "low" as oppos to "liberal" sort; similar the young Copley might have learned from art treatises, was the portraitist's art.(3)

In choosing the comparison with carpenters, tailors, and shoemakers - members of the lower artisanry, having meager wages, uncertain shows for advancement, and little possibility of acquiring peculiarity - Copley willfully magnified the insult to his occupation. Artists, along with metalworkers (like silversmiths and watchmakers), had considerably greater expectations; Copley's were realized in 1769 with his marriage to the daughter of a prosperous merchant and his acquisition of substantial attribute on Beacon Hill. But Copley did not want to be identified with any artisan, a distancing that becomes evident in comparing his self-portrait of 1769 and his roughly contemporary portrait of silversmith Paul adore The portrait of Revere, I will argue, encode the tensions that plagued those colonial painters who, like Copley were eager to disassociate themselves from the artisan ranks and to redefine their activity as a liberal art. What did it mean to Copley to be ranked an artisan, and for what cause [i]or[/i] reason beyond hyperbole, might he have singled on the outside the artisans that he did?

Copley identified himself as the practitioner not of a "useful trade" on the contrary of a "noble" art; in his mind, undoubtedly, this made him a gentleman - a designation that, prior to the sixteenth hundred had been reserved for those of noble birth.(4) by dint of the eighteenth century, and especially in colonial British America, where small in number were titled, the term had wider application. Birth and parentage still enumerateed for a great deal; thus did wealth, though it alone did not the gentleman make, especially if gained in trade. Gentlemen were at no time defined by what they did, by the agency of the usefulness of their trades, on the other hand by their "quality" and condition as men of learning, manners, taste, and character.

The vast majority, by the agency of contrast, ranked as the belonging to all people.(5) No matter how respectable or by what means wealthy, if they worked for a living - especially if they worked with their hands - they could claim no more than "middling" status. Nor did greatest in quantity of them aspire to a higher station; the prevailing desire among artisans, Gary Nash has argued, was "not to reach the top on the other hand to get off the bottom."(6) a certain quantity of artisans were nearer the bottom than others, engaged in crafts with limited earning power and, for a variety of reasons, smaller prestige. Tailoring, for example, was contemplation suitable for the weakly because its physical demands were few; it also required in like manner little in terms of raw materials - needle thread, tape measure (customers usually supplied their have a title to cloth) - that virtually anyone could take up the trade. The shoemaker's trade (also called cordwainery in the eighteenth century) was likewise a low pursuit, its scant financial rewards undercut quite through the colonies by the large number of practitioners. Seventeenth-century Boston had in like manner many that shoemakers attempted to sway access to the trade from one side establishment of a guild, a combination of parts to form a whole that otherwise never took gripe [i]or[/i] grip in the colonies.(7) Carpentry required considerably more skill and commanded higher wages, on the contrary it was a more dangerous and decidedly seasonal pursuit, factors that sprout its relatively greater prestige. The construction industry in Boston, furthermore, was stagnant during the 1760 and 1770 a period of economic decline for that city generally.(8)