The Nativity

Copley painted this small Nativity about 1776, the year the colonies declared independence, when he had just settled in London after leaving Boston and touring Italy. In Boston he had been a portrait painter. In London he wanted to be known for religious and historical subjects, the most respected kind of painting, and this picture belongs to those first attempts. After passing through several English collections it lost its author's name. When it later came up for sale at Sotheby's in London, it was catalogued as The Adoration of the Shepherds by Benjamin West, the Pennsylvania-born painter who had settled in London years before Copley and had made his career with exactly such subjects. The museum bought it as Copley's work in 1972. Four years later, in the bicentennial year, the United States Postal Service chose it for the 13-cent Christmas stamp, issued in Boston on 27 October 1976 and printed in more than 800 million copies.