Dorothy Quincy (Mrs. John Hancock)

When Copley painted her, around 1772, Dorothy Quincy was in her mid-twenties, the youngest of ten children of Edmund Quincy, a judge whose house in Braintree, south of Boston, was a regular stop for the town's radicals, John and Samuel Adams and John Hancock among them. Nobody knows what occasion the portrait marked, though it was not a wedding. She sits in a pink silk gown with triple ruffles at the sleeves and a sheer embroidered apron, a lace cap perched on her piled-up hair, her cheek resting on one hand, a pose Copley gave sitters he wanted to look thoughtful. Less than three years later she was at the centre of events. In April 1775 she was staying at the parsonage in Lexington where Hancock and Samuel Adams had taken shelter, on the night British troops marched out from Boston. That August she married Hancock at the house of family friends in Fairfield, Connecticut.