Working with all the relentless determination of his nature, Copley hardly allowed himself time to eat and sleep; he could not even spare a moment to write to his elder daughter, congratulating her on the birth of his first grandchild. "Sir Edward Knatchbull's picture has confined us to London," the younger daughter com­plained during the heat of midsummer. Life was dull while the painter slaved away interminably and. no one came to call; die painter lacked time for friends. "There have been balls, mas­querades, and fetes without end in honour of the peace, but I have had nothing more to do with them than reading the accounts in the papers."

Copley completed the picture after three years of toil, and sent it to the Royal Academy exhibition of 1803. On the night of the vernissage he dressed himself in his best clothes and hurried to the gallery, anxious to savour praise and popularity once more. Sure enough, there was a crowd before his picture. Walking more firmly than he had for years, he manoeuvred into position to see their faces, but then his own face grew pale. The people before him were not staring in reverence; they were smiling. Suddenly some­one laughed, and at once everyone shouted with mirth; they found the two dead wives suspended from the sky irresistibly funny. When. Copley tried to slink away, he felt a hand on his shoulder and saw Knatchbull himself, his face red with fury. People were mocking him, he cried; how had Copley dared show the picture without his permission? It must be removed from the show at once. Utterly discouraged, Copley nodded sadly, and the next day the hanging committee were cursing as they tried to fill with smaller pictures the space where the vast canvas had been.

But Copley's troubles with the Knatchbull Family were not done. The third'wife now demanded that the first two be painted out; sadly the painter extended the background across the faces and figures of the angels he had so carefully delineated. The irritated baronet then refused to pay for the figures that no longer showed, insisting that Copley's charge of eighteen hundred guineas for the picture was wildly exorbitant.

When the matter was brought before a legal arbiter, Knatchbull argued that if Copley had painted the picture with decent celerity, all the changes would have been unnecessary; the third wife, the new child, would never have existed at all. He added that he had been opposed to Copley's depicting his two former wives as angels; he had wanted them shown merely as portraits hung on the wall behind him. Each side called expert witnesses. After eleven paint­ers and engravers, including Beechey and Fuseli, had sworn that they considered Copley's charge reasonable, the arbiter decided for Copley, ignoring the testimony of the principal witness for Knatch­bull: Benjamin West.

A bitter story lay behind West's appearance against his former protege. When the president had secured through his friends an important commission Copley had hoped to secure through his own, Copley's dislike for his benefactor rose to a ruling passion. He became a leader in the cabal that drove West from the presi­dency of the Royal Academy, but the victory, as we have seen, was shortlived; in the end it only made Copley more than ever un­popular with the connoisseurs and his fellow-artists.

Sitting dismally in his empty studio, he cast round for some expedient that would bring back the prosperity he had lost. He experimented with pigments, trying to find the secret of the bright colours Titian had used. In 1802, his son wrote: "My fa­ther has discovered the Venetian, the true Venetian, more precious than the philosopher's stone . . . which the artists of three gen­erations have in vain been endeavouring to explore. . . . Hence­forth, then, you may fairly expect that my father's pictures will transcend the productions of even Titian himself." But Copley's canvases continued to grow progressively worse. All the virtues that had made him a great artist vanished; the drawing became weak, flabby, and pointless, the colouring watery, the compositions empty in the extreme.

The pressure of his English environment had been against the direction of Copley's genius. At heart a realist, he had painted powerfully in Boston, where the simple folk liked to see reproduc­tions of things they knew, but London was a sophisticated city, and sophistication is a struggle against reality, an attempt to polish, to veneer, to hide the naked crudities of life. In its higher mani­festations it demands the use of imagination to build for man a more beautiful world; in its lower it runs to corsets and silks and grimaces. Since Copley was not endowed by nature to be an im­aginative painter—never did the flights of his mind carry him into the mystic empyrean—the lower reaches of sophistication alone were open to him. He hid the body of truth under bright colour, brilliant brushwork, and a startling borrowed technique.