Resumen de Carpenter, tailor, shoemaker, artist: Copley and portrait painting around 1770
Taking as its point of departure John Singleton Copley's complaint that colonial Bostonians regarded painting “no more than any other usefull trade,” the essay explores what being ranked as an artisan meant to artists in eighteenth-century England and America. Portraitists especially suffered this indignity, probed here through the topos of the tailor, a persistent character in artist narratives. In the effort to redefine their activity as a liberal art, an art of gentlemen, painters employed varying strategies. Copley's politics of representation are exposed in close examination of two works from the late 1760s: his self-portraits and portrait of silversmith Paul Revere.
