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deep. The painting of the heads is superb, drawn impeccably, full of character, and with
only a touch of the old rigidity, the children especially most happy in attitude and expression. This was his
first family group in England, and Mrs. Amory says he had done nothing at all of the kind in America, with
the exception of his boyish allegory of "Mars and Venus." His groups were certainly rare, which seems rather
strange, considering the example of Smybert and Blackburn and the large dimensions of some of his portrait
canvases. It is surprising also that with so little experience he should have succeeded from the beginning
with complicated compositions. The "Family Picture" was preceded by the "Youth rescued from a Shark," and
followed by the series of his historical pictures, inspired doubtless by West's, who, as will appear in his
life, was the founder of the school; but surpassing their prototypes, they remain to-day masterpieces of the
kind. It is not too much to say that no other artist of the time could have produced the "Death of Chatham."
To the sincerity of the emotion, without false sentiment or bombast, the skill of the arrangement of grouping
and light, the clear characterization of the heads, is added a peculiarly interesting arrangement of the
scarlet and white of the peers' robes, which forces the scene upon the mind. It is not poetry, the gods did
not make Copley poetical; but it is splendid prose, and its immediate successors were of the same
quality.
These compositions, however, were but incidents in his
work. Portrait painting was the business of his life from beginning to end, but his latter work has less importance
in a history of American painting. Probably it should be called better than his earlier. It certainly had fewer
glaring faults, but it also had less personality. His earlier work is unmistakable anywhere, his latter often
approaches so closely to that of the brilliant circle of contemporary portrait painters in England that it is
practically indistinguishable from it. A little extra firmness and solidity of drawing persists to the end; but the
poses, the dark backgrounds, the rich color, the glazings, are all of the school. Like Reynolds, he sought for "the
Venetian," the marvellous medium supposed to have been used by Titian, which like the philosopher's stone would by
its own virtue transform the leaden tones of mediocre painters into gold. He even thought
a
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