Ann Tyng (Mrs. Thomas Smelt)

In London, ladies of good family went to masked balls dressed as shepherdesses. In Boston, masquerades were banned as licentious, and a portrait was about the only place where a woman could still play the part. In 1756 the teenage Copley painted Ann Tyng, then 23, as a shepherdess, with a crook held across her body like a bar, a small white dog under her left hand, and a landscape of strange rocks and peach-tinted sky behind her. The idea came from England, through prints after painters such as Thomas Hudson, and probably from closer to home as well. Joseph Blackburn, an English portraitist then working in New England, had painted a young woman named Mary Sylvester as a shepherdess about two years earlier, with the same light palette and salmon-orange drapery. Copley kept the role respectable. Her hair falls loose and the neckline is low, but she sits upright, and the creamy satin and lace cuffs say plainly that she is a lady. Ann was a daughter of Edward Tyng, the commodore who had led the colonial fleet at the siege of Louisbourg in 1745. The portrait was painted just before or just after her wedding to Thomas Smelt, an army officer who had fought at Louisbourg too. She died a month after the wedding.