John Singleton Copley

John Singleton Copley grew up in Boston with almost no real painters to learn from, and taught himself into the finest portraitist in colonial America. His sitters, merchants and their wives in sharp everyday clothes, look you dead in the eye with a plain, unsparing directness that European portraits usually softened away.

As the Revolution approached, Copley, married into a Loyalist family, left for London in 1774 and never came back. There he reinvented himself as a painter of modern history. His breakthrough was Watson and the Shark of 1778, showing a real event, a boy attacked by a shark in Havana harbour, staged with the drama once reserved for saints and battles.

He went on to huge canvases like The Death of Major Pierson, crowded with portraits of actual people. His American work and his London work barely look like the same hand, and collectors have argued ever since over which Copley was the better painter.