View a video recording of this lecture.
Join Jane Kamensky as she speaks about her book A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley. In this bold new history, Kamensky recovers an unknown American Revolution as seen through the eyes of Boston-born painter John Singleton Copley. In this life of painter John Singleton Copley, award-winning Harvard historian Jane Kamensky masterfully untangles the web of principles and interests that shaped the age of America’s revolution. Copley’s prodigious talent earned him the patronage of Boston’s patriot leaders, including Samuel Adams and Paul Revere. But the artist did not share their politics, and painting portraits failed to satisfy his lofty artistic goals. An ambitious British subject who lamented America’s provincialism, Copley looked longingly across the Atlantic. When resistance escalated into all-out war, Copley was in London. The magisterial canvases he created there made him one of the towering figures of the British art scene: a painter of America’s revolution as Britain’s American War.
Jane Kamensky is Professor of History and Pforzheimer Foundation Director of the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University. She is a historian of early America, the Atlantic world, and the age of revolutions, with particular interests in the histories of family, culture, and everyday life.
Copies of A Revolution in Color will be available for purchase in the Newberry Bookstore. Your purchase helps support the Newberry Library and this program's featured speaker.
Download a PDF flyer for this program to post and distribute, and explore materials in the Newberry collection about Art and the American Revolution, and about the history of the Colonial Americas.
Cosponsored with the Society of Colonial Wars in the State of Illinois in partnership with the University of Illinois History Department.
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