Daniel Hubbard

John Singleton Copley · 1764

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

127.2 × 100.8 cm (50 1/8 × 39 11/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Rococo

Daniel Hubbard presents one of Copley's most assured colonial portraits — a composed, quietly commanding image of a Boston merchant rendered with striking immediacy. John Singleton Copley was largely self-taught, developing his technique by studying imported European mezzotints rather than training abroad, yet by his mid-twenties he had surpassed every portrait painter working in colonial America. His genius lay in a sharp-eyed realism: the texture of fabric, the weight of a hand resting on a surface, the particular quality of light settling on a face. In Daniel Hubbard, painted when Copley was just twenty-six, that precision is already fully formed — the sitter feels observed rather than idealised. Copley sent a painting to London in 1766 to test his reputation; the response from Sir Joshua Reynolds and Benjamin West confirmed what Boston already knew, though Copley would not leave for Europe until 1774. A hand-painted oil reproduction on canvas captures what digital prints cannot — the physical presence of brushwork, the subtle layering of pigment that gives Copley's surfaces their characteristic depth. Each reproduction is painted by a trained artist working directly from the original, bringing the same careful attention to tone and texture that made this portrait remarkable in 1764.