Description

John Singleton Copley painted colonial Boston before the Revolution and then left for London and never came back, which divided his work between two countries and two reputations. The American portraits — Paul Revere at his workbench, Mrs Ezekiel Goldthwait with her fruit — are the finest paintings made in America before independence.Augustus Thorndike Perkins compiled the first catalogue in 1873; Frank W. Bayley, a Boston dealer who handled many of the pictures himself, rebuilt and greatly enlarged it in 1915. The result is a life followed by a catalogue of some nine hundred works, with two indexes that are the reason the book is still used: one by sitter, one by owner. Together they record who owned what in 1915, before the great dispersals — often the last link in a picture’s provenance. Illustrated with plates.This is a faithful print-on-demand facsimile of the 1915 Boston edition, reproduced in full from a library copy. The historical text is reproduced without modification; only the format, margins and legibility have been reset for modern printing.