Joseph Warren

When smallpox broke out in Boston shortly before this portrait was painted, a young doctor named Joseph Warren inoculated scores of patients with a mild dose of the disease to spare them the worst of it. One of them was John Adams, who described him as a pretty, tall, genteel, fair faced young gentleman. Within a few years Warren had the largest medical practice in town, and that is the man Copley painted around 1765. He sits at ease in a black coat lined with white silk, his pearl grey waistcoat left open, his left arm resting on a sheaf of anatomical drawings. Black was then the colour of professional men such as doctors and judges, before it became general fashion. The column, the landscape and the pink drapery behind him are Copley's inventions, a grand setting meant to show off the sitter's taste. Ten years later Warren was among the leaders of the patriot cause. On the night of 18 April 1775 it was he who sent Paul Revere and William Dawes riding towards Lexington, and two months later he was killed at Bunker Hill, where he fought as a volunteer. The portrait passed to his brother John, also a physician, and then down the family. In 1856 it was saved from a fire at a family house in Greenfield, Massachusetts.