By Megan Baker, Andrew Oliver Fellow, 2024-2025

As newlywed Elizabeth Copley Greene (1770–1866) settled into her new estate, she found herself thousands of miles away from the artistic family who raised her. Born in Boston in 1770 but raised in cosmopolitan London after her family fled during the American Revolution, Greene grew up immersed in the artistic circle of her father, painter John Singleton Copley (1738–1815). In July 1800, she married the Boston merchant and planter Gardiner Greene in London. Elizabeth’s subsequent reverse migration produced a bountiful correspondence between her and her family spanning decades—materials I studied as the Andrew Oliver Fellow at the Massachusetts Historical Society for my dissertation on the use of pastel in Revolutionary-era North American art.

Before Copley left for London, he was the most prominent portraitist in colonial North America, renowned for his work in oil, miniature, and pastel. Popular for replicating textures like skin and textiles, pastel was nevertheless controversial for its fragility—a quality evident in some portraits, like that of Jonathan Jackson (figure 1). Despite this concern, Copley thought his “best portraits done in that way,” and worked in pastel until he left for Europe in 1774. He favored the medium enough to use it for pendant portraits of himself and his wife, Susannah, around the time of their marriage in late 1769, a year before Elizabeth’s birth.

Of Copley’s children, only Elizabeth returned to North America; it was her branch of the family that became most invested in sustaining his artistic legacy. Elizabeth’s daughter, Martha Babock Greene Amory, wrote The Domestic and Artistic Life of John Singleton Copley, R.A. (1882), a history drawing from oral history and family letters. Another descendant, Harcourt Amory, later deposited these materials at Massachusetts Historical Society. While the Copley Family papers (Ms. N-1034) preserve Elizabeth’s received family correspondence through 1847, they lack later letters excerpted in Amory’s book, raising questions about how descendants sought to shape Copley’s legacy as they preserved it. 

While many of the works in Copley’s studio eventually reached Boston through Elizabeth’s descendants, the pastel portraits had never left. Fleeing Massachusetts with three young children during wartime, Susannah could not transport the fragile artworks. During Elizabeth’s first year in Boston, she noted that she was in possession of the portraits of her parents. Her mother’s response expressed extreme distaste (figure 2): “I have to say that I hope you will not adorn your new house with those sad portraits which you mention, pray hang them in a closet.” Though fashionable in 1769, thirty years later, they were out of style in London.

 For Elizabeth, that did not matter; the portraits were the only representations she possessed of her parents. They remained in her family a for a generation longer than the letters before being sold to the collector Henry Francis du Pont, at whose Winterthur Museum they remain today. These portraits remain in good condition because they never crossed the ocean on a ship, rather remaining as a stand-in for Copley in Boston and cared for by his descendants. To Elizabeth, their chalky faces served as daily reminders of her beloved parents; the value of seeing their faces was worth whatever the aesthetic cost. The survival of art depends on such personal devotional acts. From a daughter’s insistence on displaying reminders of home to the researcher’s study of her letters, these materials—protected through generations at Massachusetts Historical Society—help reveal human priorities and desires across time and distance.

Further Reading:

Gurnsey Jones, ed., Letters & Papers of John Singleton Copley and Henry Pelham, 1739-1776 (Massachusetts Historical Society, 1914)

Copley Family Papers, Ms. N-1034, Massachusetts Historical Society