A Revolution in Color by Jane Kamensky - W.W. Norton & Co. (2016)
This was a difficult post to write. Most of my neurons are busy struggling to make logical sense of the political circumstances in which I find myself, and the thought of writing something as mundane as a book review seems somewhat absurd—like celebrating Thanksgiving in the middle of a war. The purring, seductive voice in my head which always seeks to justify laziness urged me to neglect my weekly report and blame my absence on existential despair. It would have been so easy. But then I reflected upon the subject of my unwritten review and I realized that I was being offered a critical (and timely) lesson in perspective.
A Revolution in Color by Jane Kamensky is a detailed examination of the life of John Singleton Copley—one of America’s first internationally-renowned painters. Kamensky, a professor of history at Harvard University and a finalist for the 2009 George Washington Book Prize, is uniquely skilled at transmuting a human life into a veritable tome of information. A Revolution in Color is heavy, dense, and jam-packed with miniature paintings. It focuses as much on the ‘big picture’ as it does on the minutiae—much like Copley himself. Copley painted before, during, and after the American Revolution. He painted British soldiers and Revolutionary heroes alike. He juggled conflicting emotions on both sides of the Atlantic and never established a firm base in either camp. He wanted to improve his paintings so that they might hang alongside the canvases of Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, but that future would necessitate abandoning his homeland. And even if he uprooted himself to cross the Atlantic, it was still more than likely that the British elite would dismiss him as a backwoods upstart. John Singleton Copley’s life played out against a brutal background of instability. He lived though four bloody wars. He watched many of his heroes fall from grace, and others degenerate into bloodthirsty monsters.
And yet, he chose to find beauty. Here is the crucial lesson we can distill from Kamensky’s fabulous biography: there is room for art in every struggle. From the gory maw of the French Revolution emerged some of the most profound and thought-provoking treatises on what constitutes a man and his contentious relationship with government. Bertolt Brecht converted the horrors of the holocaust and Nazi Germany into fuel for his avant garde theatrical productions. Puppetry and poetry have been implemented as metaphorical weapons during South Africa’s slow emergence from beneath the mantle of apartheid. Art—whatever its form—is a particular kind of resistance. It is both a distraction from, and a critique of, ruling ideologies. It is, along with such things as laughter and religious devotion, a ‘weapon of the weak.’ A person’s appreciation of art cannot be suppressed without their consent—even by the most tyrannical dictator. The determination to find beauty in the darkest of places is itself an act of rebellion. And like every manifestation of rebellion, revolutionary art is complicated and angry and inarticulate and captivating all at once. Kamensky argues that,
To explore Copley’s American Revolution is to treat that war, and its world, with fresh eyes. In the United States, where the War of Independence functions as a national origins story—a ‘founding’—we tend toward histories peopled by Patriots and Tories, victors and villains, right and wrong. Such tales, for all their drama, are ultimately flat: morality plays etched in black and white, as if by engravers who have only ink and paper to depict all the shades of a subject. But like the paintings Copley produced so painstakingly, the revolutionary world was awash in an almost infinite spectrum of color. Allegiance came in many shades. Some pigments were durable, others fugitive and shifting. The age of revolutions takes on a prismatic quality when we try to view it through Copley’s slate-colored eyes, eyes that saw deeply, and revealed many truths, not all of which we now hold to be self-evident.
Several things can be gleaned from this passage. First, that Kamensky herself is a literary artist of merit. She employs the terminology of a painter to make sense of the greater world. By doing so, she grants her readers access to Copley’s unique perspective, and partially excuses his apparent hesitation—his complicity. Enthusiastic Patriots might accuse Copley of infidelity simply because he painted British soldiers and aristocrats who were loyal to King George. What these readers forget is that Copley belonged to a group of artisans who have long depended upon the patronage of the ruling class. The skills with which an artist might set himself apart from the rest of the ambitious pack—his ability to depict velvet, lace, and jewels—also necessitated a personal relationship with the wealthy and powerful. And, complicating matters even more, there were the benefits Copley personally received during the tumultuous years of warfare. Many artists took advantage of a climate in which performance and symbol had a significant impact on outcome. Writes Kamensky,
The warm red glow of British valor spread well beyond the front lines. Ordinary colonists mapped out new routes to patronage and preferment within the expanding British fiscal-military state. A portrait in uniform was both a tool in that quest and a reflection of its success, enacting a dawning imperial manhood by robing the sitter in the fabric of the Nation.
Kamensky’s crimson-tinged universe ends up sounding a bit like one of William Blake’s alternative myths of origin—those industrial kilns of creation. She essentially drenches Copley in the blood of the Revolution from which he eventually rose to international fame. She suggests that,
…the war that made British America also made John Singleton Copley and Benjamin West, both of whom grew to manhood during those starving, booming years. The war did not make them artists. The chemical reaction of talent and diligence did that. But war was the crucible in which those volatile elements combined to forge the rudiments of a trade, maybe even a calling.
This calling went unheard in England. When Copley finally ventured across the Atlantic he found himself on the wrong side of an imposing wall of snobbish elitism. Born and raised in ‘little’ Boston,
Copley performed both dominance and obeisance poorly. By turns ingratiating and imperious, he kissed up and kicked down. He was probably vain and certainly ambitious: qualities that meshed uneasily with his deep, pervading caution.
Copley was out of his depths in London. Several of his English history paintings achieved critical acclaim and he became a member of the Royal Academy, but he was always an outsider at the mercy of public opinion. Having survived four wars, the loss of his Boston estate, and decades of snide comments from his British peers, Copley ended his life in a state of exhaustion. Writes Kamensky:
Rare is the person who grows easy and generous with passing decades, rare still the artist whose last works transcend biography. The mythos of late style was just emerging at the end of Copley’s life, which means he may have felt some compunction to measure himself against it, thus finding a fresh avenue for disappointment. Copley’s old age was marked by prolonged personal agony, and his late work evinces nothing so much as exhaustion. A faded star in an aging empire, he lived out his final decades still fighting the war he had tried to escape when he left British America in 1774, all the while watching the new United States, with its fetish for youthful innovation and its unshakable faith in its own rising glory, shimmer at the edge of his vision.
John Singleton Copley was too sympathetic to the men and women he painted to be an American. He also lacked the geographic credentials of a true Englishman. This persistent state of limbo must have been excruciating for the artist, but it also provided the electric charge of frustration which pulses beneath some of his most brilliant canvases. Watson and the Shark is one of my favorite history paintings from the eighteenth-century. Likewise, The Death of the Earl of Chatham and The Death of Major Peirson are remarkable in their emotional complexity and neurotic attention to detail. Paul Revere, on which ‘oceans of ink have been lavished,’ is considered by some to be the personification of America. Despite a lifetime of rejection and frustration, Copley did in fact achieve most of his aims. Jane Kamensky makes this clear when she begins her incredible biography with a tour of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Walking past Copley’s portraits of Paul Revere, John Hancock, Samuel Adams and Dr. Joseph Warren, she marvels that
They were meant for separate fates, in firelit parlors in middling homes, in a bustling entrepôt at the edge of an empire. Viewed together centuries later, in the chilly splendor of the great museum, through the glaring light of hindsight, they become a patriotic pantheon: American originals painted by another of their breed.
John Singleton Copley’s story proves that a man can spend his entire life struggling against political fanaticism, elitism, and international upheaval, and still find his place within the whispering vaults of history. Once the turmoil of the current political climate is diluted and we’ve had several decades to reflect and theorize, perhaps we shall drag forth our own unrecognized heroes. America is a bubbling cauldron of strong opinions and volatile energy. With time—and a healthy dose of hindsight—we identify values which endure; individuals whose legacies persist. Thus we build upon the nebulous body of which we are all constituent parts. And we define ourselves.
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