Rebecca Boylston

Rebecca Boylston was 40 and unmarried when Copley painted her in 1767, and in colonial Boston most women in that position lived on the hospitality of relatives. She had her own share of her father's fortune and ran the household of her rich, unmarried brother Nicholas, and this canvas was one of six family portraits Copley was commissioned to paint for the walls of the Boylston mansion on School Street. He gave her the dress and props he usually kept for much younger women. She stands in a gleaming white satin gown with red and purple drapery, one arm on a fountain, a basket of flowers in her hand. The dress historian Aileen Ribeiro took the satin for studio drapery arranged on a mannequin, never a real garment. About six years later, in 1773, she married Moses Gill, a wealthy landowner who later became lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, and sat for Copley a second time, which he rarely did for a woman to mark a change in her life. That second portrait is at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum in Providence. This one stayed in the family and hung at the Museum of Fine Arts on loan from 1903 until a descendant bequeathed it in 1976.