Off-Center

Portraiture and John Singleton Copley’s Samuel Adams

John Singleton Copley’s 1772 portrait of Samuel Adams in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is among the most important artworks of the American revolutionary period. John Hancock commissioned the work, which hung in his home alongside his own portrait that the artist painted seven years earlier. 

Copley was neither a Patriot nor a Loyalist. He did not approve of British taxation and its military presence in Boston, and appears to have attended some Patriot meetings. On the other hand, his wife was Susanna Farnham Clarke, daughter of Richard Clarke, a loyalist heavily invested in the tea that was dumped into Boston Harbor in December of 1773, which traumatized the family greatly. Many Bostonians were suspicious of him. At one point, an angry group of patriots invaded his home in the middle of the night to interrogate him about a Tory friend who had just visited. He eventually moved to London in 1774 to pursue his art career, never to return.

The Samuel Adams portrait dates to sometime in 1772, between the Townshend Acts and the Tea Act. It commemorates one of Adams’s defining moments, when he confronted the loyalist royal governor of Massachusetts Bay, Thomas Hutchinson, demanding the removal of British troops after the Boston Massacre (1770). Scholars consistently point out the modest Puritan’s presentable but unimpressive clothing, his intense, “terrifyingly present” disposition (MFA, Boston), the petition of grievances resolutely gripped in his right hand, and the Massachusetts Charter from King William and Queen Mary, to which he points. The overall effect of the painting is to put the viewer in the place of Mr. Hutchinson at the moment of confrontation.

Portraits of this period do not generally generate a great deal of excitement for the casual museumgoer. Even though portraiture was held in high esteem at the time, most people today prefer Grand Style history paintings, mythological and biblical scenes, landscapes, images from everyday life, or even still lifes. Yet with a little training, we find that portraiture can be captivating and exciting. In a world without moving pictures and government-issued identification, visually establishing one’s personal and social identity then meant something different than it does today. 

An effective portrait utilizes posture, gesture, expression, setting, and attributes to tell a story. The medium is of a kind with drama and dance, with its desire to express inner content and social narratives using non-verbal cues. Portraits are meant to be studied. Each element is chosen for a particular purpose: to communicate the personality and significance of the subject. The most successful likenesses animate the person portrayed, allowing the viewer to feel the impact and consequence of the sitter.  

Copley succeeds at this in his portrayal of Samuel Adams. His energetic pose, decisively turned head, and facial expression tell us that he is both a serious and active man, and that the documents he holds and gestures toward are attributes central to his patriotic purpose, one important enough to pictorialize for the ages through art. The unassuming red outfit captures the fire, fury, and blood of the Bostonians. The white shirt peaking through at the neck and arms draws attention to his head (i.e., mind) and hands, since the ideas from Adams’s work as a writer and agitator were the cornerstone of his reputation.

Yet, the overall design of the work tells us things not usually mentioned in art historical accounts of the painting. For some reason, Copley places Adams’s head and torso slightly off-center in composition. Artists generally do this when they want to highlight something next to the main figure, like a landscape or other feature pertinent to the subject’s life. For instance, John Hancock is seated to the left in his portrait to make room for the prominent ledger book he writes in, which informs the viewer of the large fortune he inherited and for which he was widely known. However, Samuel Adams’s portrait does not appear to require any such displacement, since it merely contains faintly rendered columns in a darkened background.

This ends up being a small but quite important artistic decision. Adams was largely responsible for the patriotic change in the “Hearts and Minds of the People” that propelled the Colonies toward Independence, as his second cousin John Adams later characterized the Revolution. His voice and promptings were everywhere in Boston during the period, so much so that Thomas Jefferson referred to Samuel Adams as “the patriarch of liberty.” But as historians such as Pulitzer Prize biographer Stacy Schiff point out, Adams actually preferred to work behind the scenes and in the background, letting others like John Adams or John Hancock take center stage publicly. So while zealous in his writings and forceful in his beliefs, the unassuming Puritan willingly chose to be slightly off-center in his counter-royalist role, as his portrait subtly and thoughtfully illustrates. 

There is another reason why Copley displaces Adams’s body slightly to the left in the artwork: to create visual room for the dimly lit background columns. At first blush, these appear to be merely decorative and formulaic. Columns are a common motif in Neoclassical art. However, here they importantly reinforce the off-centeredness of his position in both the painting and in pre-revolutionary events. Their inclusion makes it seem as if he has just emerged from the shadows to argue on behalf of his compatriots, which was how the man preferred to position himself politically at the time.

Indeed, given the risk of being caught and arrested by the British, the confrontation with Hutchinson was probably the only time Adams took such a prominent public role in the lead-up to the war. Interestingly, the line of the foremost column draws the viewer’s attention downward to what Copley does place squarely in the pictorial center of the painting: Samuel Adams’s hand, which points to the Massachusetts Charter, the terrestrial focal point of his life and career that he devoted his mind and body to save from tyranny.

Copley’s Samuel Adams also touches on a larger aspect of art in general. Images of the human face and figure have been, by far, the central subject matter in art going back to the very emergence of our species. For some reason, human beings continually need to create portraits of ourselves and of others, likely because we feed upon the life and energy that a human being embodies. The more realistic or life-like the portrayal, the greater the connection we feel to the life-force of the person being portrayed. As a social species, we come to know ourselves through interacting with others, and find inspiration, vitality, and comfort in the knowledge of those people we artistically represent. Copley’s image of Samuel Adams effectively, memorably, and compellingly contributes to this perpetual anthropological necessity.

John Singleton Copley’s Samuel Adams is an excellent example of the fascinating capabilities of portraiture as an artistic genre. Although the artist may have been noncommittal in his political views, he nevertheless provided posterity with an image that is as powerful, subtle, forthright, and austere as his patriotic subject.