Any man who could slap together a likeness was patronized. Modern scholars who have examined, even with ultra-violet light and X-rays, the thirty-eight paintings which have come down from seventeenth-century New England have discovered that almost ev­ery picture shows a different personal style; the smallness of the demand increased the number of artists. Probably not a single American painter up to the time of Copley's youth had been able to make a living from his art. Therefore, the early portraits were done by craftsmen—silversmiths, carpenters, house-painters—who made likenesses on the side to pick up a little extra money. ■It is significant that only two of the seventeenth-century New England portraits can be ascribed to a painter whose name is known, and both these to the same man. Since the social honour accorded professions in a materialistic society is based on the money they bring in, artisans who executed portraits were not proud of this poorly paid activity; they did not sign their pictures, and when they executed legal papers they designated themselves as practi­tioners of more respectable trades. Feke and Badger, two of the outstanding artists during Copley's young manhood, referred to themselves respectively as "mariner" and "glazier"; the names of painters were not considered worth preserving, even by the painters themselves. Yet some of them became quite proficient in recording likenesses.

Occasionally the New England craftsmen were joined by artists from abroad. The first English painter of importance to come to the colonies was John Smibert, who landed in Newport ten years before Copley's birth. He had accompanied Bishop Berkeley across the Atlantic on a mac! scheme to found a college in Bermuda to train "the savage Americans for the ministry.". A fellow-pupil of Hogarth at the Thornhill Academy, Smibert had spent three years studying on the Continent and had enjoyed a small reputation in London, where he was patronized by the Virtuosi Society. Horace Walpole regretted his departure for America, which he ascribed to hatred for art politics, and a desire to find a savage Utopia, but George Virtue, the celebrated art chronicler, maintained that Smi­bert left England because he wanted to be at the head of his profes­sion wherever he was, and knew that was impossible in London. Certainly his work does not rank high even among the weak por­traitists who were fashionable before the rise of Reynolds. He brought Kneller's worst mannerisms to America.

When Bishop Berkeley's scheme collapsed, Smibert settled in Boston, where he made a rich marriage and established a virtual monopoly of the portrait business. A friend and business associate of Pelham, he probably gave Copley some instruction. We know the boy saw hanging in his studio the copies he had made of Eu­ropean masterpieces, including the one of Van Dyck's Cardiiial Bentivoglio that was by itself to constitute the first American art school. Copley, Allston, and Trumbull, three of America's leading painters, all found in this one picture their first hints of a richer portrait style.

We can visualize Copley, not yet in his teens, bent with aching attention over the copies that brought him a pale reflection of great art. Twenty years later, when he was himself a famous artist, he was to see the originals and write home that Smibert's copies were in­accurate, miscoloured, and badly drawn. But as a boy he was deeply impressed. There in the studio of a disgruntled English painter who had been unable to make a good living at home, the muses first whispered in the ears of the Colonial genius who had never seen a well-painted picture.

However, Copley's period of instruction under Pelham and Smi-