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Miles Sherbrook
- Interior
- Man
- Letter
- Brown
- Dark Brown
- Flesh
- New York
"John Singleton Copley in America," Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Mass., June 7 - Aug. 27, 1995; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, N.Y., September 26, 1995 - January 7, 1996; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Tex., February 4 - April 28, 1996; Milwaukee Art Museum, Wis., May 22 - August 25, 1996. (Exh. cat. no. 72)
"America's First Old Master: Portraits by John Singleton Copley, from The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston," Chrysler Museum of Art, Small Changing Gallery, Norfolk, Va., May 18 - August 15, 2004.
"Reopening of the Joan P. Brock Galleries," Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Va., Opening in March of 2008.
"American Treasures at the Willoughby-Baylor House," Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA, January 2 - December 1, 2013.
“Once Upon a Time in America: Three Centuries of US-American Art,” Wallraf-Richartz Museum and Foundation, Cologne, Germany, November 23, 2018 – March 24, 2019.
American, 1738–1815
Miles Sherbrook, 1771
Oil on canvas
No great American art museum collection would be complete without a key work by the renowned early Boston portraitist, John Singleton Copley. Walter Chrysler acquired Miles Sherbrook in 1979 and gave it to the Museum in honor of his grandparents. Here, Copley painted merchant Miles Sherbrook with a letter and quill in hand, attributes of a diligent and earnest man of commerce. By presenting the wealthy New Yorker without a wig and by including the scars on his cheeks, this intimate portrait communicates the sitter’s character and values rather than his social status. Both Sherbrook and Copley feared the financial consequences of the American Revolution. While the businessman lost his fortune during the war, America’s leading portrait painter relocated to London, ensuring a steady supply of patrons.
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., in memory of his grandparents Anna-Maria Breymann and Henry Chrysler 80.219
Boston, Mass. 1738-1815 London, England
Portrait of Miles Sherbrook, 1771
Oil on canvas, 49 1/2 × 39 in. (125.7 × 99 cm)
Dated on the letter the sitter holds: 1771
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., in Memory of his Grandparents, Anna-Maria Breymann and Henry Chrysler, 80.219
References: Jules David Prown, John Singleton Copley, Cambridge, 1966, I, p. 229; idem, "John Singleton Copley in New York," The Walpole Society Note Book, 1987, p. 31; Carrie Rebora, Paul Staiti et al., John Singleton Copley in America, exhib. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Milwaukee Art Museum, 1995-96, no. 72.
During the two decades preceding the American Revolution, the portraitist John Singleton Copley emerged in Boston as the most distinguished of colonial artists. His many portraits of influential New Englanders-merchants, clergymen, lawyers-were remarkable for their craftsmanlike polish and clarity of design. Their excellence captured the attention of Benjamin West (see object 71.720) and other artists in London, where Copley began to exhibit in 1766. The lure of London and the Continent eventually proved irresistible for Copley. In 1774 he embarked on a European tour and the next year settled in London. He remained there for the rest of his life, building a second, European career on the strength of his portraits of the British aristocracy and his ambitious figurative paintings of historical and religious content.
Copley spent most of his early, American period working in Boston. In 1771, however, he briefly interrupted his Boston practice with a seven-month visit to New York. The trip was prompted in part by an invitation from a New York resident, Stephen Kemble. In April of 1771 Kemble wrote to Copley that he had secured the names of several influential New Yorkers who would sit for him if he came to that city. Among the subscribers Kemble listed was the merchant Miles Sherbrook, who agreed to have his likeness painted in Copley's standard half-length format of fifty by forty inches, at a price of twenty guineas. The result was the imposing Portrait of Miles Sherbrook in the Chrysler Museum of Art.
Many of Copley's New York patrons were British loyalists, Tories who sided with England during the American War of Independence. One such loyalist was Sherbrook. Born in Britain, he immigrated to the colonies and during the late 1760s achieved prominence in New York business circles as a partner in the London-based import firm of Perry, Hayes, and Sherbrook. Having condemned him for his royalist sympathies during the Revolutionary War, the New York legislature voted in 1779 to seize his property and banish him from the state. In 1787 he was allowed to return, though he never recouped his fortune. In 1805 he died a widower in Westchester County, New York.
Copley's portrait of Sherbrook appeared in England at some point after the Revolution-possibly after Sherbrook's death. Scholars lost sight of the painting during the nineteenth century, and it was presumed to have vanished for good. It was rediscovered in England only in 1977 and was acquired by the Museum three years later.
The portrait shows Sherbrook seated at a table, dealing with his affairs. A handsome man in the fullness of middle age, he is portrayed without a wig and is dressed simply, in business clothes: russet breeches, waistcoat (a kind of vest), and frock coat, all of which glow warmly in the light entering the picture from the left. His cheek is scarred with pockmarks, possibly from a bout of smallpox. They give a weathered quality to Sherbrook that seems to underscore our impression of him as an unpretentious, forthright businessman.
Copley typically provided his male sitters with attributes that signified their vocations. Sherbrook holds a letter and quill pen, objects the artist used in several other portraits to indicate the mercantile profession. The eloquent simplicity of the painting and its extraordinarily incisive presentation of character are the marks of Copley's best portraits of the late 1760s and early 1770s, a period when he began to place his subjects in darker, more neutral settings and make dramatic use of chiaroscuro to spotlight their faces and hands. In portraits like Miles Sherbrook, Copley advanced beyond the rococo extravagances of earlier European portraiture to create images that captured the simple strength and moral idealism of the emerging American republic.
JCH
Martha N. Hagood and Jefferson C. Harrison, _American Art at the Chrysler Museum: Selected Paintings, Sculpture, and Drawings_ (Norfolk, Va.: Chrysler Museum of Art, 2005), 20-21, no. 1.