Mrs. Theodore Atkinson Jr. is an oil-on-canvas portrait painting completed in 1765 by the American artist John Singleton Copley.

During this time, Theodore commissioned John Singleton Copley to paint a portrait of his wife to display in their home.

Theodore had been in poor health for quite some time and it was rumored that Frances and John, both still in love, were having an affair.

His burial took place on the following Wednesday; by the Governor’s order all the bells in town were tolled, flags were hung at half-mast, and minute-guns were fired from the fort and from the ships-of-war in the harbor.

On Sunday the weeping widow, clad in crapes, listened in church to the funeral eulogies; on Monday her affliction was mitigated; on Tuesday all the fingers of the seamstresses of the country roundabout were flying; and on the next Sunday, in the white satins and jewels and fardingales [hooped skirts] of a bride, she walked up the aisle the wife of Governor Wentworth.”[3] They remained in New Hampshire with John as governor.

[4] On June 13, 1775, the brink of the American Revolutionary War, the Wentworths fled New Hampshire for England.

Accustomed to America and England, Frances supposedly hated her life in Nova Scotia, and had an affair with Prince William.

[11] The New York Public Library lent it to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1938 for their John Singleton Copley exhibition.

[12] In turn the New York Public Library auctioned off the painting as lot 4 at Sotheby's on November 30, 2005.

At the same auction, the Crystal Bridges Museum also bought other works that once resided in the collections of the Lenox Library and New York Public Library, including Portrait of Marquis de Lafayette and Gilbert Stuart's George Washington (The Constable-Hamilton Portrait).

In April 2017, the paintings were reunited and displayed together for the first time in more than a century at the Crystal Bridges Art Museum.