Mrs. Joseph Mann (Bethia Torrey)

In 1753 Copley was 15, and Boston had almost nobody who could teach him how to paint a lady. What it did have was prints. London publishers sold mezzotints of courtiers and royalty, and colonial painters borrowed from them freely. For Bethia Torrey, the 22-year-old wife of a tavern keeper named Joseph Mann, Copley took the pose from a print after Willem Wissing's portrait of Princess Anne, published in the 1680s, long before she became queen. The elbow resting on a rock, the string of pearls running through her fingers, the low neckline edged in white all come from the princess. Copley changed what did not suit a tavern keeper's wife in New England. He raised her bodice, set her in front of an American landscape of his own, and gave her a cool, level look in place of the princess's softer glance. The anatomy is unsure in places and the paint is heavy, yet he signed it boldly at lower right, J.S. Copley Pinx 1753. Her husband sat for him the following year. The canvas stayed with her family, passing down through the descendants of a niece, until 1943, when two of them gave it to the museum.