Although the boy was to make a great career in England in the law, he was unable to reclaim the farm, and its loss seemed so overwhelming to Copley that he gave up all hope of returning to America. Innumerable witnesses state that the transaction in which he got only five times his original investment remained like an open wound in his mind, embittering the rest of his life. Sixteen years later Farington wrote in his diary that Copley complained that the property he had sold for a few thousand pounds was now worth a hundred thousand. "Upon this he ruminates, and with other reflections founded on disappointments, passes these latter days unhappily."

Indeed, from the time of the loss of his farm Copley's star de­scended rapidly. In 1798, the war with France joined with the Irish rebellion to suck England into an economic depression that deep­ened all through the Napoleonic period. Only the most fashionable painters were able to make a living, and even their incomes were greatly reduced. Out of pity, the Prime Minister excluded artists from the war tax. Copley was not one. of the most fashionable* painters; after a lifetime of dreading such an eventuality, he found himself on the brink of poverty.

And now, when more than ever Copley needed his skill, a strange blight came over his ability to paint. Each succeeding picture turned out less happily. Still trying to duplicate West's triumphant career, he turned to religious subjects—Hagar and Ishmael, Abra­ham's Sacrifice, Saul Reproved by Samuel—but they were not greatly admired. His new historical paintings did not succeed like the old; he was refused permission to show his Duncan's Victory at Campertown in the Green Park as he had shown Gibraltar; he had to set up his tent in a nobleman's private garden, and hardly anyone paid to see the picture.

Difficulties with engravers threw him increasingly into.debt. Sharp, whom he had commissioned to make a print of Gibraltar, dawdled for years without even starting the plate; the subscribers demanded their money back. And when Copley commissioned a small print of The Death of Chatham for sale to the masses, the delivered plate was so bad he dared not publish it. He refused to pay-the engraver, and the engraver sued. Bartolozzi, who had made the large print of the same subject, appeared for his colleague. "Do you see, sir," Copley's attorney asked Bartolozzi, "in your own [print] the youngest son of Lord Chatham in a naval uniform bend­ing forward with a tear in his eye and a countenance displaying the agony.of an affectionate son on beholding a dying father; and do you see in the other an assassin, with a scar upon his cheek, exulting over the body of an old man whom he has murdered? ... In one, the Archbishop of York appears in his true colours as a dignified and venerable prelate; in the other, his place is usurped by the drunken parson in Hogarth's Harlot's Progress. In one, the Earl of Chatham is supported by his son-in-law, Lord Stanhope, a figure tall, slender, and elegant; does not the other offer to view a short, sturdy porter of a bagnio, lugging home an old lecher who has got mortal drunk?" Bartolozzi denied all this, and was followed on the stand by "an immense number of engravers" who praised the con­tested print. Copley's attorney then called many painters—West, Beechey, Opie, Cosway, Hoppner—who insisted Copley could not publish the print without hurting his reputation. In his charge to the jury, the judge professed total ignorance of art, and the jury ruled that Copley must pay for the engraving. Thus the artist lost nearly a thousand pounds.

Since he needed to execute some great work to revive his waning fortunes, he enthusiastically agreed to paint one of the largest con­versation pieces in history; it was to show a country squire. Sir Edward Knatchbull, with his second wife and ten children. When the squire said that he missed the portrait of his first wife, Copley, in his eagerness to do something startling, suggested hanging her from the sky as one of a group of angels. Convinced that the longer he worked on a picture the better it would be, and at best one of the slowest of painters, he mulled over every figure for months on end, until Knatchbull's youngest child, seeing him around the house so much more often than her father, made a natural mistake and called him "daddy."

After two years, the dogged painter began to near the end, but at that moment Knatchbull's second wife died. The squire married again and insisted that his third wife be put in the picture in place of the second, while the second, now also an angel, be suspended in the clouds beside the first. Copley was so eager to please that he laboriously rearranged the composition, but just as the picture again neared completion, Knatchbull appeared to say that his new wife was pregnant; a likeness of the baby, as soon as it came, must be inserted. The bewildered painter, who had put so much effort into the canvas, did not dare disagree; again much of the picture was repainted.