 Fy enw i'r ddw i'r gwaith yma, mae'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r Ddweud yma, a rydw i'n ddylai'n gweithio yma yn ddweud o'r ddweud o Professor Jules Prown, yr amherytus yma o Ysgrifetau Arddurol yn Ysgrifetau Arddurol. Felly, rydw i'n ddweud o Ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r Ddweud i'r gwaith, John Singleton Copley, ac Copley yna rhai gau yma i'r ymweldio gyflaenau gyda Prince. Copley yw'r cwbl yn gweithio'r ysgolwyr, oherwydd gyda'r ymweldio cwbl yn cefnodol, oedd ymddir o'r arwein o'r rhai cyflaenau, yn cyflaeniau, ac mae'n gweithio'n bwysig o'i'r ysgolwyr. Ond y cwplyau yng Nghymru yn cael ei gwybodaeth, yna yn rhan o ddweud yn ogymru. Dwi'n meddwl gyda'r cwplyau ar y gwybodaeth. Yn ni'n gwybod, mae'r cwplyau dyma'r gwplyau er mwyn i'r cymdeithas ar y Prins fel ym yma o amdano, o'r adrwynt ar gyfer fynd yn y cyfnod. Am yw'r 10 oed, ddweud ar gweithwyr wedi Pwyddoedd Pwyddoedd Peter Pelham. Pellum wedyn yn ymweld yllyfrnidol wedi'u mynd i ddweud yng Nghaerdydd, wedi'i mynd i ddweud yng Nghaerdydd yn Lundig, a'r Rhaglenioli, yn 1727, ydy'r cyhoedd ffordd cyhoedd, mae'r ymddangos yn dda, ac mae'r cyhoedd ymweld yma, ddim eisiau ddefnyddio'r llwyll yma. Fy hollfyn i'r llygau, efallai maeth yw meddwl gyflym. Yn 1748, ydych yn y ddech chi, yn 1751, i ddweud ymweld, Copley was in the studio of a Metsiton engraver, and exposed to all the tools and implements but Pellum also was a painter. He didn't paint many, there's only one surviving oil painting that's not in very good condition. But he was exposed to just the smell and the feel of an artist's studio. Plus the fact that there are prints and books and portfolios, all sorts of things. If you're in the American colonies, there's no museums, there's no place to go, see art, there's no Europe. I saw you're starved for the visual images. So this was a very important beginning and he's oriented toward art. Pellum dies when he's 13 and Copley apparently feels some responsibility for his family. He has a half-brother, he's a couple of years younger, and a widowed mother. When he's 15 years old, he starts to produce pictures. And one of the first things he produces is a print, which is a portrait of Reverend William Wallsteed in 1753. It's not as original a move as one might think because what he does is he takes one of his stepfather's plates, which was a portrait of the Reverend William Cooper of 10 years earlier. And he planishes out the like this. And in fact, if you look at the Wallsteed, you can see the halo behind the head. You can see where he's rubbed it out and put in the like of Wallsteed. And then because the names are so similar, he only had to take out Cooper and put in Wallsteed and that's up here, the titling. And then he just took out his stepfather's name. So he takes out Pellum and he puts in his own name in the lower left as the artist. And he's in business. He's in business indeed, and that's a very interesting substitution. Copley also, I know early in his career, produces mythological paintings. And are they as engaged with the world of print as something like this? Absolutely. And I'll talk a little bit about the specifics of that. But what that move is is an indicator that not only does he want to be an artist, but he wants to be an artist operating at the highest level of the profession, which is history painting. That is the painting of historical mythological religious pictures in which the artist has to bring together a number of figures and have them all interacting appropriately in terms of gesture, pose, expression, dress, background. So much more complicated than just simply replicating an individual or a landscape or still life or whatever it is. So he wants to be not only just a painter, but he wants to be working at the highest level of the profession. So he begins very early with history paintings. One of them is the Forge of Vulcan, 1754, the next year. And that comes directly after an engraving by Tardieu after Coypel. It's virtually the same print. So that is a clear indication of what his aspirations were in that direction. He produces a number of these things. One of the very good ones is the return of Neptune. And here he takes the composition from a very similar painting, almost identical, a return of Neptune by Ravinet after Cassali. He wouldn't have heard of Ravinet through Smybert. Smybert, like Pelham, was an English-trained artist who came to America very early, settles in Boston, and lives only a couple of blocks away from Copley. So Copley knows Smybert, he knows Smybert's work. Smybert also had a collection of copies of Old Master paintings, plaster casts. It was the closest thing for a museum. It was right just down the street. And Smybert in London, like Pelham, would have known Ravinet because Ravinet was a well-known figure in London in the middle years of the 18th century. So he takes that picture and makes some minor changes. He adds a clouded sky in the background, and of course he's moving from black and white to color, so he's introducing color as something new. He also decides to make a pendant picture to Neptune, which is a galatea, which is based on an engraving after the Venetian artist Gregorio Lazzarini of Galatea. And here he makes some other changes, and in particular he wants to have these as pendants. Now he crops the image, and that brings the figure of Galatea closer to the foreground, which makes it similar in size to the Neptune. And then he makes some minor changes. He moves one of the cupids around, he moves the position of the trident, and he closes the composition that would be made by pendants as opposed to the composition of a single picture. That's really interesting to have seen that in action. Those re-workings of prints that he would have seen and would have been circulated and disseminated to the colonies from London and from Paris, I imagine. Absolutely. I mean, that's the whole issue. If you're in the American colonies in the 18th century and you want to be an artist, what are your options? They're very limited in terms of what you can do. They're dependent on books, on prints, any kinds of illustrations. There are very few European paintings here. In relation to this issue of his training, we've seen him working directly from a portrait print, and now we've seen him looking at a range of and working from a range of prints depicting mythological historical subjects. But there's also this very interesting anatomy book. Can you tell us a bit more about that? Yeah, it's a fascinating object. It's actually in London in the record office and it gets into a later story, but it was when Copley eventually goes to England and his half-brother Henry Pelham goes. This book goes with him and it gets confiscated and it ends up owned by the government. In 1756, Copley, with his ambition to be a history painter, makes a personal manuscript anatomy book for his own use, because he knows that to do these mythological paintings, you have to understand the human figure and how the human anatomy works. That's fundamental. So he starts copying things from several sources. One is from anatomy-approved and illustrated by Bernardino Genga and Giovanni Maria Lancisi. There there are individual plates, individual figures. So just to make it more compact and more useful, he just combines and he puts the two of them together. So you get this one of two human torsos, a frontman of act of view, but he puts them into a single plate. Of another source, of a Dutch source, van der Grocht, he copies the plates from van der Grocht, which are individual plates, but he does two things. One is he flips them, he reverses them. And the other thing he does is he takes the written text, which is on different pages in the source, and puts it on the same page. He puts it right on the page where he has the illustrated image. And what's also a very interesting aspect of it, he makes changes. So they're not exactly the same as the source but they are more up-to-date. And that means he's talking to some physicians in Boston and there were some, A, who were interested in art, who had art books, but also had studied in Edinburgh and they knew some of the changes that were made in the understanding of the human anatomy. So he's updating it in that way. Then another twist on it is that van der Grocht, in making his book, takes it directly from the first great book on human anatomy, The Humane Corpus Fabrica. What van der Grocht did when he took it from Veselius was he flipped the images and then Copley quite consciously flipped it back again. So that flipping is not just part of a tracing and copying process but actually is intentional. And the evidence of that is that Veselius himself, with the specific four plates that Copley uses in his book, those are the four plates that Veselius indicated, and I quote him here, display a total view of the scheme of muscles such as only painters and sculptors are wont to consider. So they were not in there for doctors and physicians. They were there for artists and Copley uses it that way. They're the most relevant pictures for him. Yeah, precisely. Fascinating. Is there something similar going on in the portraits that he painted during his time in the colony? Yeah, it was all well and good. He wanted to be a mythological painter but Boston in the middle years of the 18th century, there wasn't much demand for mythological or religious paintings, particularly that kind of religious paintings, but there was a big demand for portraits. And so he responds to that. In fact, that was the mark that the Parliament had been responding to with his prints. But right to the start he begins to paint portraits in 1753, the same year as the Wall Street engraving. His portrait of Mrs. Joseph Mann of 1753 was based on an English medicine by Beckett after William Wissing, a portrait of Princess Anne about 1683. So there's what a 70-year gap. But Copley takes this source. Again, he reverses it so that the opening is on the left instead of on the right. The pedestal is on the right instead of on the left. But he changes the face, obviously in the hairdo. Keeps the pearls. So he's adopting it for his own purposes. Another portrait of the similar period is the boy of the Greenleaf family, the boy with the plume turban, which comes from an early 18th century Mezzatyn after Sir Godfrey Neller, a portrait of Lord Burry. This one, he's making it into a detail, so he's moving in a lot closer, eliminating things. But he adds things, he adds the lamb and so on. So he's doing these things and he's taking these sources, Wissing and Neller, they're artists who, you know, half-century and more earlier. And I don't think it's because it's the only thing that's available to them. I really think it's because it's what his sitters wanted. It's what they knew, it's what they were familiar with, it's what they thought of as a portrait. So in helping, working, and the sitter works with the artist, to choose a compositional option, particularly if there are prints around and you can have your choices. They like the old ones. So they go for that. But as time goes by, Copley begins to use more and more contemporary sources. His portrait of Chief Justice Jonathan Belcher is particularly directly from a 1741 engraving after Thomas Hudson of William Fortescue. So there is a 15-year gap. Hudson is the most influential of the English artists on the American portrait painters. Almost all of them, up and down the seaboard of the American portrait painters, are using Hudson as the source. The influence of Hudson, which of course is very influential in England too, is very fashionable. But Copley has continued to move forward in time so that in his portrait of Mrs. Gareth Mill Bowers going into the mid-60s, that's based directly after a McArdle resident of Lady Carolyn Russell by Joshua Reynolds. So he moves from Wissing and Neller to Hudson to Reynolds. He's becoming more up-to-date in his sources, and of course the hairdo and all these things are also of the time. There's another thing that goes on there that's really an important element of the influence of these prints. That is, the images he's looking at are black and white. And it's characteristic of Copley in particular, but also of many of the other American artists, but Copley above all, and Copley is the best of the American colonial painters but far, is that they are very linear. They are necessarily following the prints which are black and white. They're very strong in light-dark contrast, or value contrast. So his picture stand out as being very clear and sharp in that character. And also as a result that they tend to be very two-dimensional. And American paintings, when they're seen by Europeans at the time, the one thing they really criticize of is being, they don't really know how to make it three-dimensional. They don't know how to get the space into it in the form. So it's because of this dependence on, at least that's my theory, he had been urged for years by Benjamin West and others with whom he corresponded. To come to Europe study, get to be a better artist. Business is falling off. The political situation is deteriorating. People don't want to have their portraits made. They've got other things on their mind. So he goes to England in 1774 on route to Italy. And then spends a year in Italy studying the old masters, making copies, making some of his own works, and drawings and learning. And then goes back to England and settles there as a wife and family come over. And it's a permanent settlement. He never comes back to America. In America, of course he's known better for 21 years he painted here, but he actually continued for another 40 years in England. So it's really a quite different career although he continues to make portraits throughout that whole time. One of the pictures that a remarkable painting to my eye is with which he made an impact in a reputation in London when he does settle in London is this extraordinary picture, Watson and the Shark. And in this picture and in other pictures that he paints during his time in England, does he continue this engagement with graphic arts and with prints? Yeah, he does in various ways, somewhat surprising a little bit. The first one I guess is just as a composition, it's very reminiscent of Ruben's Lion Hunt, which was a very well-known picture. A copy he had a copy of it in his own collection. And he did have a collection of prints that included well over a thousand copies or prints by old masters, Ruben's, Van Dyck, Rembrandt. The Lion Hunt would have been one of them. But then in the specific details, particularly the boy in the water, and there have been various articles written citing possible sources for it. One of the persons was the famous Borghazi Gladiator. After classical sculpture, so the Borghazi Gladiator won the young boy in the Hellenistic Leacowan, which had recently been excavated, is another one in Raphael's famous painting of the Transfiguration, which Coplay not only saw in Rome, but also made his own version of it, called the Ascension, a small version. There's an astonished boy whose arms are raised, and they're very similar sort of pose. That's another possible source, and there are ones in Raphael's cartoons of figures reaching into the water, so there are a lot of those sources. Now it's sort of the traditional use of going back to earlier sources. But copy does something here that's original and very interesting, and that is one of the characteristics of American artists is that they have a tendency toward realism. In the case of history painting, and this is where Coplay is realizing it's the beginning of his dream of becoming a history painter with multiple figures, which he found very difficult at. He put more than one person in the picture and he writes to Pelham from Rome about now he sees all these pictures with lots of figures in them as have. It's difficult, it's not as difficult as he thought it was going to be, but it's still tricky. But the American painters moved the history painting in the direction of realism. The first really, Weston Coplay to move it in the direction of contemporary history plus the prevailing theory was that in order for things to be really respectable and historical everybody had to be wearing togas and have it in classical garb and they say, no, no, if they're modern figures they have to be in modern clothing and actual figures. So what Coplay does here is the background that's supposed to be set in Havana Harbor where the boy he was swimming, he was on a British ship, merchant ship, and it's attacked by a shark. But Coplay makes it into Havana Harbor so he looks at maps to get the setting of the harbor right and views so that the buildings in the background, this is Havana Harbor so that the convent is on the left, Moral Castle is on the right so he's attempting to make it as real as he possibly can. He also is interested in making a print after it. So this painting which is very dramatic and usually you're struck by it and even to that you go into the National Gallery of the Museum of Fine Arts with the two versions of it you just see kids come into the gallery and they're just transfixed by it. It's a very striking picture. So he has a Metsitent made of it by Valentine Green one of the leading Metsitent engravers of the period and that was published a few months after this and it's very successful, very widespread and even today you see a lot of copies after Coplay that are based actually on that print. Some years earlier Valentine Green had engraved some of the first history paintings that Benjamin West had done for George III and they were all Metsitents. The problem with Metsitents is that they wear down very quickly so you can throw off maybe 3-400 copies but then it's pretty well done then you're out of business and it's not adequate for history paintings that are going to be popular. West is the one that made the breakthrough with his very famous painting for George III well it wasn't originally for George III but the painting of the Death of Wolf and that was engraved by William Wollett and published by John Boydell who was a very active British publisher painted in 1771 published in 1776 and that was an engraved one and that was sold for one guinea a copy of one guinea and it was said that Boydell made 15,000 pounds just from its sale and of course West did very well from it as well so that established the fact that it's a large market for prints after these major history paintings and Coplay picks up on that right away so with his next major history painting which is the Death of Chatham and he's carrying this reel a step further he actually paints portraits of all these individuals and many of them became clients subsequently and he painted individual portraits of them and he decides not to exhibit it at the Royal Academy which he did with Watson but rather to put on his own show and he exhibits it in spring gardens and charges people to come see it and takes subscriptions for an engraving to be made after it and it was very successful 20,000 people came to see it over a six-week period and the attendance at the Royal Academy dropped sharply because of the competition and they lost a thousand pounds in comparison to the previous years so people liked it they bought subscriptions and in fact the proofs they wanted the early ones and the proofs would come out first before all the text goes on it those were all oversubscribed so the lesson learned there was that it's possible to do this with engravings not without problems as Copley soon discovers anyway he hires one of the leading engravers Francesco Bartolazzi to make an engraving and the expectation was it would be done in four years so Bartolazzi hires a couple of assistants Gattano Testolini and Jean-Marie de Latre to work out the plates and they're working on it and Bartolazzi is disappointed in the work by Testolini he doesn't like it and gets rid of it and doing that he weakens the plate he thins it so it's less durable and less able to produce the number of engravings that were wanted and moreover it was a very slow process and it took ten years to finish the plate before it was finally done so fine engraving but that delay damaged Copley's credibility as a publisher because he had made a decision after Watson and Sharpe which had been published by the engraver Valentine Green so he became his own publisher and that's more complicated it's not just being the artist you have to sell the prints you have to keep lists of subscribers you have to produce them you have to keep everybody happy you have to pay in advance to the engraver you have to pay on the completion of the work so it's very complicated in the case of the death of Chatham there was this delay and in order to make it easier for people who had sort of forgotten who these people were he publishes a key to it which would identify the figures and they sold that for three shilling six pence and people were pretty annoyed they brought this picture and now they have to pay extra to find out who the people were in it so they were not very happy about that in addition to having had to wait Copley produces the key and he also hires the assistant who had worked with Waterlotsie, Delotra to make a small version and a cheap version that he could sell I mean that he would pay Delotra 800 pounds for it part in advance the rest would be done on completion and when it's done this is a small version Copley doesn't like it he says it's really bad and if I publish it it's going to ruin my reputation so he refuses to pay Delotra so Delotra doesn't like that he sues him and the thing goes to court when it goes to court all the engravers the craftsmen come out and they testify for Delotra all the artists come out and they testify for Copley and this is a reflection of what had been a long battle in the Well Academy as to whether or not to admit engravers into the Well Academy many of the artists felt well they're not artists they're craftsmen it's a different world they stay where they belong unfortunately for Copley with the trial the jury was made up mostly of craftsmen there weren't many artists on the jury so he lost and Delotra won the case so another bad experience for Copley Turning now to the death of Major Pearson the picture with which Copley followed the death of Chatham was this too a picture that was very much geared to the print market? Yes it was Copley's really at the zenith of his English career at this period and I think producing his best pictures I think this is the best of his history paintings and his portraits of the period were also among his very best he began work on it in 1782 but it was not exhibited until 1784 then he arranged to have it engraved by James Heath another leading engraver the painting was exhibited it was a big hit this is a time when the news that the English are getting from America they're losing the colonies they're losing battles everything is going downhill and here was a tremendous British triumph on the island of Jersey over the French and the very dramatic picture dramatizes it and Copley again makes it realistic includes some portraits of individuals but he sets it in the town square of St. Helier where the event actually took place and he also included in the lower right figures of his family his wife is the woman on the far right his baby and his son John Stigold and Copley Jr later Lord Lindhurst and in fact more famous than Copley the artist in his later career he was Lord Chancellor three times under Queen Victoria and the fact that they knew this was going to be a major picture and important and when it was exhibited to the public separately from the Royal Academy Boydell hired Gilbert Stewart who was then studying with Benjamin West in London to make three portraits one of Copley which was in the top center of the frame one of James Heathy engraver on one side and one of Josiah Boydell publisher Boydell's brother who was going to make a drawing from which the engraver would work so it was a big show that was put on here so a portrait of an engraver was displayed alongside the painting so that the role of engraving in relation to the painting was made really explicit important point absolutely so Heath goes to work on it and he's very busy on it and he uses a lot of assistance but it's a very slow extended process and it was not published until 1796 even though it was painted in 82 in the 80s and 90s Copley starts to move in other directions and here he's been doing contemporary history paintings and he gets an idea and West is doing the same thing well what about earlier English history in the 17th century they both paint scenes of the 17th century England particularly around the Civil War and trying to reconstruct them as accurately as they possibly can well okay well they're not around there then so how do they get that information well Prince was a major major source and whatever else they could find coins medallions anything but gave them some idea of what these people looked like so he does some of those they're not terribly successful but they're what he was doing and he also tries his hand at religious paintings and he does a few of those and they're known largely through engravings there's one by Robert Duncarton of Abraham offering up Isaac where in fact the painting has disappeared many religious pictures were thrown out in the 19th century and this one is known only through the engraving whether it exists somewhere or not we just don't know but we know it through the engraving that's interesting isn't it because there we find engraving actually allowing an image to survive that would otherwise disappear from view so this relationship between painting and engraving that you're opening up here is so multifaceted another very famous painting Siege of Gibraltar can you tell us a bit about that and again was this a painting that was produced to be engraved yes again this was a major British victory this time over the combined fleets of the Spanish and the French off of Gibraltar and therefore very popular because of the subject matter and the city of London decides to commemorate it with a major history painting to go in the Guild Hall and this sets up a competition between Copley and West both of them want that commission and Copley wins it and sets the work on this enormous painting it's 18 by 25 feet and it takes a long time to do it but he finishes it in 1791 the commission comes in 83 so it took a long time to do it and he worked hard on it he got portraits of the individual people who were there he traveled to Germany and painted oil sketches of some of the Hessians officers the ones who were in the upper right background there and elsewhere also in the foreground first he tries to hire Baudelotsi again but that falls soon so he hires William Sharp to make an engraving that takes a long time in fact the first proof that is things without any inscriptions or anything don't come until 1804 and the final one is not done until 1810 that's 27 years for it to be finished and by that time many of the people who had originally subscribed to the engraving were dead they were no use and they were going to pay up the rest of their subscription and lose his old hat we're not really interested in it so that became a problem for the sale of the print Copley also had a recourse to prints for visual sources like with the things of the 17th century he wasn't there, he wasn't at Gibraltar but there were people who were so there was for example an engraving published after a drawing made by a lieutenant G.F. Curler who had been aid to comp to Lord Heathfield, the victor at Gibraltar so Copley uses that print and the pose of Heathfield it's an equestrian pose in the big picture it's the same extended arm position so that's his source on that now his last major history painting was the victory of Admiral Duncan which was exhibited right at the end of the 18th century wasn't it, 1799 what's the print history of that painting? Rather different in a way Copley had learned his lesson the hard way he goes back to Mezzatinn and it's not so ambitious he hires James Ward to make a Mezzatinn and be satisfied with fewer impressions and the result is very good actually the large history painting is very good and Copley's later work tends to fall off in quality but this painting certainly does not it's very good and the Mezzatinn is very good and Mezzatinn is of course much speedier to produce than line engraving although there are fewer impressions he could be guaranteed that the work would come out much more quickly than with the line engravings which had taken so long so often for him and he would sell more of them but even there the sales were slow and he had 140 of the 400 left over so it was not a complete success but it was better so Copley died in 1815 and five years later there was a big sale of his estate there was a big painting sale but there also was a print sale and in that print sale there were I think 5,000 items or more there were about 1,000 or 1,200 of the old masters and contemporary rentals there were many and a lot of rentals but also Rembrandts and Wubbins but most of them were his own left overs things that didn't sell there were 3,800 left over prints of these history paintings but also as I said earlier he had made portraits of many of the figures for example ones who sat in for the death of Chatham they became individual portraits so he painted William Pitt, Earl Howe, Admiral Duncan people who were involved with history paintings Lord Bessborough, Earl Spencer by Count Sidmouth he had some royal commissions he painted the daughters of George III he painted an equestrian portrait of George IV but by and large most of his commissions were from the nobility and the mercantile class but not from royalty a lot of these prints then were in his studio at his death and unsold and so his son Lord Lindhurst he's got these things so they sell them and the sale is a flop I think it brings in a total of 375 pounds for almost 5,000 prints completely unsuccessful so when you look back on it he's an inspired by he gets ideas from graphic arts from prints old master and contemporary and that's the good news on the other hand his experience while trying to produce them and sell the prints after them which seemed to be so promising in the end it didn't turn out to be and he was interviewed by the artist, Iris Joseph Farrington and the Farrington quotes him as saying the difficulties of a painter begin when his picture was finished if an engraving of it should be his object That's a very nice way to end Jules Perran, thank you very much for your insights into John Singles and Coppola's multifaceted engagement with prints and print culture I enjoyed it, thank you for your good questions