He may have been taught various subjects, it is reasonably conjectured, by his future stepfather, who, besides painting portraits and cutting engravings, eked out a living in Boston by teaching dancing and, beginning September 12, 1743, by conducting an "Evening Writing and Arithmetic School", duly advertised.

It is certain that the widow Copley was married to Peter Pelham on May 22, 1748, and that at about that time she transferred her tobacco business to his house in Lindall Street (a quieter, more respectable part of town), at which the evening school also continued its sessions.

"[10] Copley himself complained, in a letter to Benjamin West, written November 12, 1766: "In this Country as You rightly observe there is no examples of Art, except what is to [be] met with in a few prints indifferently exicuted, from which it is not possable to learn much.

It is likely that through the fortunate associations of a home and workshop in a town which had many craftsmen, he had already learned his trade at an age when the average art student of a later era was only beginning to draw.

[12] Copley was about fourteen and his stepfather had recently died, when he made the earliest of his portraits now preserved, a likeness of his half-brother Charles Pelham, good in color and characterization though it has in its background accessories which are somewhat out of drawing.

William Welsteed, minister of the Brick Church in Long Lane, a work which, following Peter Pelham's practise, Copley personally engraved to get the benefit from the sale of prints.

A self-portrait, undated, depicting a boy of about seventeen in broken straw hat, and a painting of Mars, Venus and Vulcan, signed and dated 1754, disclose crudities of execution which do not obscure the decorative intent and documentary value of the works.

Thomas Ainslie, collector of the Port of Quebec, acknowledged from Halifax the receipt of his portrait, which "gives me great Satisfaction",[13] and advised the artist to visit Nova Scotia "where there are several people who would be glad to employ You."

This request to paint in Canada was later repeated from Quebec, Copley replying: "I should receive a singular pleasure in excepting, if my Business was anyways slack, but it is so far otherwise that I have a large Room full of Pictures unfinished, which would ingage me these twelve months if I did not begin any others.

"[22] Though not much is known about his specific work process and professional minutiae, his studios in Boston became sites for high-class subjects to meet and discuss personal affairs and the execution of their depictions.

The circumstances of this visit, which was supplemented by a few days in Philadelphia, were first disclosed through Prof. Guernsey Jones's discovery of many previously unpublished Copley and Pelham documents in the Public Record Office, London.

From these letters and papers, published by the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1914, it appears that in 1768 Copley painted in Boston a portrait of Myles Cooper, president of King's College, who then urged his visiting New York.

Accepting the invitation later, Copley, between June 1771 and January 1772, painted thirty-seven portraits in New York, setting up his easel "in Broadway, on the west side, in a house which was burned in the great conflagration on the night the British army entered the city as enemies.

The correspondence also contains Copley's careful instructions to Pelham concerning the features of a new house then being built on his Beacon Hill "farm," giving elevations and specifications of the addition of "peazas" which the artist saw for the first time in New York.

[12] In September 1771, Mr. and Mrs. Copley visited Philadelphia, where, at the home of Chief Justice William Allen, they "saw a fine Coppy of the Titian Venus and Holy Family at whole length as large as life from Coregio".

"In England, what [Benjamin] West and Copley did together was to create a new kind of history painting, one with modern, topical subjects, chiefly death scenes of heroes, in a historic manner, but with scrupulous attention to contemporary detail" (Johnson 441).

His journey toward Rome was made in company of an artist named Carter, described as "a captious, cross-grained and self conceited person who kept a regular journal of his tour in which he set down the smallest trifle that could bear a construction unfavorable to the American's character.

October 8, 1774, found Copley at Genoa, where he wrote to his wife describing, among other things, the inexpensiveness of the silks: "The velvet and satin for which I gave seven guineas would have cost fourteen in London."

He visited Naples in January 1775, writing to his wife: "The city is very large and delightfully situated but you have no idea of the dirt … and the people are as dirty as the streets—indeed, they are offensive to such a degree as to make me ill".

Copley happily rejoined his family and set up his easel, at first in Leicester Fields[34] and later[35] at 25 George St., Hanover Square, in a house built by a wealthy Italian and admirably adapted to an artist's requirements.

[12] For a place over the fireplace of the George St. dining room was painted the great family picture now at Boston, which, when first publicly shown by Lord Lyndhurst at the Manchester exhibition, 1862, was "pronounced by competent critics to be equal to any, in the same style, by Vandyck".

To this censure, obviously unfair to one newly arrived in London and uninformed as to the professional ethics of exhibiting, Copley one morning wrote a caustic reply, and in the evening wisely threw it into the fire.

He painted the Stars and Stripes over a ship in the background of Elkanah Watson's portrait on December 5, 1782, after listening to George III's speech formally acknowledging American independence.

He felt himself victimized when he learned that the purchasers knew of a project of building the Massachusetts State House at the top of the hill, and he sent his son John Singleton Copley, Jr., then at the beginning of his brilliant legal career, to Boston in 1796 seeking to annul the arrangement.

A memorandum prepared for him by Gardiner Greene stated that long after the land "had passed out of Copley's possession it, or a part of it, was offered at no higher price than was paid to his son.

"[43] Allen Chamberlain, whose Beacon Hill gives a detailed summary of the complicated negotiations surrounding this purchase, holds that Copley was fairly compensated at a price three times what he had paid for property from which he had had rents of considerable amount.

"[44] Mrs. Amory makes out a case for Mrs. Copley's admirable management,[45] but it appears that a standard of living difficult to maintain in the changed circumstances made much borrowing inevitable.

Mrs. Copley wrote on December 11, 1810: "Your father has been led to feel this affair [his unsuccessful litigation to recover the "farm"] more sensibly from the present state of things in this country where every difficulty of living is increasing and the advantages arising from his profession are decreasing".

And on March 4, 1812, he wrote: "I am still pursuing my profession in the hope that, at a future time, a proper amount will be realized from my works, either to myself or family, but at this moment all pursuits which are not among the essentials of life are at a stand".

The estate was settled by Copley's son, later Lord Lyndhurst, who maintained the establishment in George St., supported his mother down to her death in 1836, and kept the ownership of many of the artist's unsold pictures until March 5, 1864, when they were sold at auction in London.