Mrs. Theodore Sedgwick and Daughter.
Copley’s portrait of his own children is given on a later page. This family group always startles all who have seen it only in photographs; for its colors are so unexpected, so frankly crude and vivid. The individuals are all charming. The oldest child, the daughter, Elizabeth, stands in the foreground in a delightful white frock of striped gauze. This is worn over a pink slip, and the pink tints show in the thinner folds of whiteness; a fine piece of texture-painting. The gauze sash is tied in a vast knot, and lies out in a train; this is a more vivid pink, inclining to the tint of the old-rose damask furniture-covering. She wears a pretty little net and muslin cap with a cap-pin like a tiny rose. This single figure is not excelled, I think, by any child’s portrait in foreign galleries, nor is it often equalled. Nor can the exquisite expression of childish love and confidence seen on the face of the boy, John Singleton Copley, Junior, who later became Lord Lyndhurst, find a rival in painting. It is an unspeakably touching portrait to all who have seen upturned close to their own eyes the trusting and loving face of a beautiful son as he clung with strong boyish arms and affection to his mother’s neck.
Infant Child of Francis Hopkinson, “the Signer.” Painted by Francis Hopkinson.
This little American boy, who became Lord Chancellor of England, wears a nankeen suit with a lilac-tinted sash. It is his beaver hat with gold hatband and blue feather that lies on the ground at the feet of the grandfather, Richard Clarke. The baby, held by the grandfather, wears a coral and bells on a lilac sash-ribbon; such a coral as we see in many portraits of infants. Another child in white-embroidered robe and dark yellow sash completes this beautiful family picture. Its great fault to me is the blue of Mrs. Copley’s gown, which is as vivid as a peacock’s breast. This painting is deemed Copley’s masterpiece; but an equal interest is that it is such an absolute and open expression of Copley’s lovable character and upright life. In it we can read his affectionate nature, his love of his sweet wife, his happy home-relations, and his pride in his beautiful children.
There is ample proof, not only in the inventories which chance to be preserved, but in portraits of the times, that children’s dress in the eighteenth century was often costly. Of course the children of wealthy parents only would have their portraits painted; but their dress was as rich as the dress of the children of the nobility in England at the same time. You can see this in the colored reproduction of the portraits of Hon. James Bowdoin and his sister, Augusta, afterwards Lady Temple. That they were good likenesses is proved by the fact that the faces are strongly like those of the same persons in more mature years. You find little Augusta changed but slightly in matronhood in the fine pastel by Copley. In this portrait of the two Bowdoin children, the entire dress is given. Seldom are the shoes shown. These are interesting, for the boy’s square-toed black shoes with buckles are wholly unlike his sister’s blue morocco slippers with turned-up peaks and gilt ornaments from toe to instep, making a foot-gear much like certain Turkish slippers seen to-day. Her hair has the bedizenment of beads and feathers, which were worn by young girls for as many years as their mothers wore the same. The young lad’s dress is precisely like his father’s. There is much charm in these straight little figures. They have the aristocratic bearing which is a family trait of all of that kin. I should not deem Lady Temple ever a beauty, though she was called so by Manasseh Cutler, a minister who completely yielded to her charms when she was a grandmother and forty-four. This portrait of brother and sister is, I believe, by Blackburn. The dress is similar and the date the same as the portrait of the Misses Royall (one of whom became Lady Pepperell), which is by Blackburn.
Mary Seton, 1763.