Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Winslow (Jemima Debuke)

For nearly 200 years, Jemima Winslow wore the wrong dress in this picture. Copley painted her in 1773 beside her husband Isaac, a wealthy Roxbury merchant 23 years her senior, who had married her two years after his first wife died. Isaac liked to mark each change in his household with a portrait by whoever was Boston's leading painter, and this was at least the third. Copley seated the couple almost as equals, their heads level, her left hand and its reflection on the tabletop close to his. He is in riding clothes, a gloved hand holding a crop and a round riding cap. She wore costly English brocaded silk and a lace cap on her towering hair. A year later Isaac accepted a seat on the governor's appointed council, and his neighbours forced him to resign it. In 1775 the family fled into Boston and their mansion was burned, and in March 1776 they left with the British army for Halifax. The portrait went with them. Isaac died in New York in 1777, and Jemima carried the canvas on to London. There, it seems, she hired a painter other than Copley, though Copley was living in London by then, to repair the damage of the journey. He turned her flowered silk into a plain grey-green gown and her lace cap into a sober braid, more in line with the new neoclassical taste. That later dress was removed in 1975, and the original silk came back.