Mrs. James Warren (Mercy Otis)

When Copley painted her, around 1763, Mercy Otis Warren was in her mid-thirties, the wife of a Plymouth merchant and farmer, with three small sons, and nothing she had written had yet been printed. That changed in 1772, when a Boston newspaper ran The Adulateur, an anonymous satirical play mocking the colony's governor, Thomas Hutchinson. More plays and political pieces followed, and in 1805, this time under her own name, she published a three-volume history of the American Revolution, one of the first accounts of it ever written. She owed her learning to her parents, who let her sit in on the lessons her older brother James was given to prepare him for Harvard. None of this is in the portrait. She stands in profile in a fashionable blue satin gown and turns to look straight at us, her fingers among the leaves of a nasturtium vine. Copley first painted roses there, and their ghosts still show faintly beneath the green leaves. The same blue dress appears in two other portraits Copley made of much younger women around this time, and one historian has suggested that the Warrens lent it to them.