Benjamin West's career has shown us that it was possible to achieve fame in the Colonies as an infant-prodigy painter; but Cop­ley's temperament was the opposite of West's. While the Pennsyl­vania lad was slashing away in happy disregard of his ignorance, painting castles and togas and Colonial faces, with the naive self-confidence of childhood, in Boston Copley was bending over his canvases in an agony of bewildered indecision. Every feature he painted was questioned, rubbed out a dozen times, and then al­lowed to remain at last only because the picture had to be finished. If the boy whose childhood had been a round of terror possessed any self-confidence, it was the grim determination of the frightened who fight lest they perish.

There is no agreement among the critics concerning the influ­ences that moulded Copley's first professional paintings; indeed, it is doubtful which of the canvases ascribed to his boyhood are really from his brush. By attributing pictures to the infant-master accord­ing to his own preconceptions, a critic may demonstrate the influ­ence of any Colonial limner who can be shown to have been in Boston, but other critics are at liberty to assert that the pictures on which this case is based are not by Copley at all. It is an invigorating debate that will probably go on for ever.

From the voluminous correspondence of Copley's later years we may, however, be certain of one thing: it was natural to his charac­ter to seek instruction wherever he could find it. Since he never re­lied on original inspiration unless forced to by lack of models, he certainly consulted all the artists and studied all the paintings that came his way. During his childhood, there was the example of Pelham and Smibert, and also that of Robert Feke, the mariner from Oyster Bay who is generally conceded to have been the best American-born painter before Copley and West, and who practised in Boston during 1748-49. Although the boy was only eleven when Feke went away, he may easily have studied during his teens some of the admirable canvases that the primitive master left behind him.

After Smibert, Pelham, and Feke had died or left, two greatly inferior artists, Joseph Badger and John Greenwood, practised in Boston; they were the rivals, perhaps the inspirers, of Copley's first professional efforts, which were made when he was about fifteen. Badger, the son of a poor tailor, had been trained as a house-painter and glazier; that he moved in very simple circles is shown by the fact that his wife was illiterate. He imitated Smibert and, as Law­rence Park points out in his article on Badger, copied stock poses from English prints. Filling in the gaps from his own imagination, he painted canvases which, despite their muddy colour and clumsy drawing, have a naive sincerity that gives them a certain archaic charm. They were considered such wonders of art that for ten years he was the most admired painter in New England.

Second to Badger was Greenwood, who had learned to paint as an apprentice to a maker of charts and coats of arms. His style was more nervous and sensitive, but he had the disadvantage of coming from a relatively sophisticated background; he recognized his lack of training and thus never attained the childlike self-sufficiency that makes some of Badger's canvases delightful though ridiculous worlds of their own.

Whoever were his Colonial masters, Copley forgot them instantly when in 1754 or 1755 Joseph Blackburn turned up in Boston. Blackburn is like a figure in legend; he came from nowhere and disappeared into the void, but during his seven or eight years in America he executed some of the most urbane portraits the Col­onies had ever seen. In particular, he had a gift for graceful poses, quite unlike the stiff mannerisms of the local artists. Although he must have been trained in England (for his work suggests that of Hudson, Reynolds's master), not a single canvas of his has ever been found there. Perhaps he had been the drapery painter for a more famous artist; his American portraits show an almost feminine af­fection for laces and satins, and considerable skill in depicting still-life objects, while the faces are weak and characterless.

Although Copley, who was doing portraits on his own, could never have been Blackburn's apprentice, he enthusiastically imi­tated the newcomer's virtues, not hesitating to borrow entire con­ceptions if they pleased him. When Blackburn painted a Colonial belle as a shepherdess with a crook in her hand and a lamb by her side, Copley did the same for one of his own sitters. By such means he quickly assimilated the grace of his elder's style, and then he was the better painter, for he was developing to a superlative degree the quality Blackburn lacked; the ability to depict character in faces. By the time he was nineteen, Copley's fame had travelled so far that he was invited to Nova Scotia. "There are several people who would be glad to employ you," wrote Thomas Ainslie of Halifax. "I believe so because I have heard it mentioned." Copley, however, did not go; perhaps the idea of travel terrified him.