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Robert Hooper
John Singleton Copley (born Boston, MA 1738-died 1815 London, England)
ca. 1770-1772
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Classification
- Paintings
- Dimensions
- 50 x 40 in. (127.0 x 101.6 cm)
- Museum
- Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Diane and Norman Bernstein
- Rights
- CC0 (Smithsonian Open Access), 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 Smithsonian Institution
About this work
Mr. Hooper was the son of Robert King Hooper, who owned a fishing fleet that worked out of Marblehead, Massachusetts. The younger man already sports the rotund physique that Copley had captured in a portrait of Hooper's father years earlier. Behind him, the sea, visible through an open window, recalls the source of his family’s riches. Robert had graduated from Harvard in 1763, and Copley's painting shows him settling into the comfortable life of a merchant prince.
