Description:
woman; portrait; costume/uniform
Label Text:
Painted nearly forty years apart and by two of colonial Boston's most prominent artists, these portraits (Smibert, "Mrs. John Erving," and Copley, "The Honorable John Erving," SC 1975:52-1) of a husband and wife demonstrate the achievements of American painting in the decades leading to America's war for independence. John Smibert arrived in the colonies from England in 1728 with the intention of founding a university in Bermuda. While his island plans met with continuous delay he made a career for himself painting portraits. His fashionable European painting style quickly made him the leading portraitist in Boston in the 1730s, when he painted this lively portrait of Abigail Phillips (1702-1759), daughter of a prosperous Boston family and wife of John Erving (1693-1786). As was his custom, Smibert based the pose on British portrait engravings, which he collected and shared with other American painters. John Singleton Copley was the heir to Smibert's fame and eventually eclipsed the older artist in the years before the Revolution. His portrait of John Erving, a successful Boston ship owner, shows the traditions of portraiture that he honored and the remarkable technical prowess with which he re-invigorated them. Whereas Smibert depicted his sitter against a flat background, Copley exploited details such as the ruffled cuffs, silver inkwell and prominent quill pen to celebrate the sitter's learned, wealthy, and influential status. At the same time, the skillfully detailed objects demonstrate Copley's own mastery of his craft.
Other label: John Smibert’s portrait is painted in a fashionable British style and is based on a print of the Countess of Ranelagh, after a painting by Sir Godfrey Kneller, Smibert’s teacher. Smibert went on to use the same pose many times for his portraits of affluent Boston matrons. In Erving’s portrait, the artist adds interest by varying the position of her arms from the original print (below).
Within seven years of his arrival in Boston, the British-trained Smibert received nearly one hundred commissions for portraits from the city’s growing class of merchants. Portrait prices were based on size and detail such as background scenery.
While the demand for Smibert’s formulaic portraits eventually faded, his personal collection of copies of major European paintings continued to influence young artists. Among them was the Boston-born John Singleton Copley, whose portrait of Erving’s husband hangs in this gallery.
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https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+1981.12 |
