Mrs. Daniel Hubbard (Mary Greene)
John Singleton Copley (American, 1738–1815)
c. 1764
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- 127.6 × 100.9 cm (50 1/4 × 39 3/4 in.)
- Culture
- England
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Arts of the Americas
- Credit line
- Art Institute of Chicago Purchase Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
John Singleton Copley was largely self-taught, his only formal training from his stepfather Peter Pelham, an English artist who specialized in mezzotint engraving. He nonetheless garnered considerable success as a portrait painter before the Revolutionary War. The sitter here, Mary Greene Hubbard, was a member of Boston’s merchant class (Copley’s portrait of her husband, Daniel Hubbard [1947.27], is also in the Art Institute collection). Her pose, gown, and background were precisely copied from a British engraving of a noblewoman, yet Copley distinguished the work as his own by capturing the figure’s individual features as well as the surfaces and colors of the luxurious fabrics. A decade later, he left colonial Massachusetts for England to further his career and simultaneously escape the strong political divides among family, friends, and patrons amid the impending Revolution.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
