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Mrs. George Watson
John Singleton Copley (born Boston, MA 1738-died 1815 London, England)
1765
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Classification
- Paintings
- Dimensions
- 49 7/8 x 40 in. (126.7 x 101.6 cm)
- Museum
- Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Smithsonian American Art Museum, Partial gift of Henderson Inches, Jr., in honor of his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Inches, and museum purchase made possible in part by Mr. and Mrs. R. Crosby Kemper through the Crosby Kemper Foundation; the…
- Rights
- CC0 (Smithsonian Open Access), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Smithsonian Institution
About this work
Mrs. Watson, the wife of a wealthy Boston merchant, wears a fashionably low-cut gown of luscious satin and white lace and holds a porcelain vase that echoes the contours of her figure. The yards of expensive fabric and silk ribbons in the costume testified to George Watson's success as an importer of European goods, as did the fact that he could afford to commission a portrait from Boston's foremost painter. Mrs. Watson showed herself to colonial society as a fashionable English matron, but her direct gaze suggests the grit and character of a new American society that would emerge within ten years.
