Portrait of Mrs. Joshua Henshaw II (Catherine Hill)

In colonial America, where portraiture became the principal artistic genre, John Singleton Copley soon gained a reputation as the leading portraitist of his native Boston, where he lived until 1774. His mastery at capturing both the physical and psychological presence of the sitters also led him to triumph in Europe, where he became the fashionable painter of London society portraits. At the beginning of the 1770s, the prosperous merchant Joshua Henshaw II (1746‒1823) commissioned Singleton to paint his portrait and that of his wife Catherine Hill, which belongs to the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza collection. In both paintings Copley follows the same method used for his earlier portraits in which the sitters, generally positioned in the foreground, are depicted with their faces powerfully illuminated and in distinguished poses borrowed from the English portrait tradition. In the portrait of Catherine Hill, Copley sets out to convey the sitter’s psychology through the penetrating gaze directed at the viewer and by setting the young woman against a dark background in which she appears to float. As in most of his works, the painter displays his skill at capturing on canvas the different textures of the sumptuous textiles and at painstakingly rendering the tiniest details of her clothing, such as the lace, brocade and pearl trimmings. Paloma Alarcó