Joseph Gerrish

John Singleton Copley · 1770

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

82.6 × 63.5 cm (32 1/2 × 25 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Rococo

Painted on the eve of the American Revolution, Copley's portrait of Boston merchant Joseph Gerrish carries the quiet authority of a man at ease with his own standing in the world. John Singleton Copley was the preeminent portrait painter of colonial America, largely self-taught yet technically precise in ways that astonished his contemporaries. His method of building up layers of glazed oil paint gave his subjects an almost tactile presence — the sheen of silk, the weight of wool, the particular softness of skin in northern light. In Gerrish, that craft is plainly at work: the face is rendered with a directness that feels less like flattery than honest appraisal. Copley left Boston permanently in 1774, just four years after completing this portrait, and never returned — making works like this a final record of the colonial merchant class he knew so well. Now held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, this portrait is reproduced here entirely by hand in oil on canvas, following Copley's own medium. Each layer is applied with the same patient attention to tone and texture that has kept the original vivid for over two and a half centuries.