A Revolution in Color

In this life of painter John Singleton Copley, Jane Kamensky untangles the web of principles and interests that shaped the age of Americas revolution. Copleys talent earned him the patronage of Bostons leaders but he did not share their politics and painting portraits failed to satisfy his lofty artistic goals. A British subject who lamented Americas provincialism, Copley looked longingly across the Atlantic. When resistance escalated into war, he was in London. A painter of Americas revolution as Britains American War, the magisterial canvases he created made him one of the towering figures of the British art scene. Kamensky brings Copleys world alive and explores the fraught relationships between liberty and slavery, family duty and personal ambition, legacy and posteritytensions that characterised the era of the American Revolution and that beset us still.