The Solace Project #16

Hello Friends,<br/><br/>Today we walk to Boston to visit Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Izard, yes Ralph pronounced &#8220;Rafe,&#8221; in a portrait by Copley that could take a lifetime to examine and discern. We won&#8217;t take that long, it&#8217;s much too nice out to spend too much time, but a close look will be so rewarding, I promise.<br/><br/>First off, a bit about husbands and wives in colonial British portraits. Copley painted hundreds of people in Boston and vicinity, many of them pictures meant to hang side together in an entry hall or a parlor, so-called pendant portraits.&#160; He had only painted a husband and wife together in one picture twice before: <a href="https://www.philamuseum.org/collection/object/103026">Thomas and Sarah Morris Mifflin</a> now hangs in the beautiful new galleries of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The portrait of <a href="https://collections.mfa.org/objects/32678/mr-and-mrs-isaac-winslow-jemima-debuke?ctx=a790be2e-ea83-4436-9bf0-71f0ed2dda4f&#38;idx=0">Isaac and Jemima Debuke Winslow</a> is right nearby here, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the largest collection of Copley&#8217;s work anywhere. Both of these pictures he painted in 1773, the Izard portrait in 1775, maybe by this time in his career, he was about 35 years old--middle aged in those days--he had a premonition that in future his pendant husband and wife portraits were doomed to separation by family inheritance. You know, possessions get split up, just as people do too. For instance Hannah and John Winthrop would end up at The Met and Harvard, respectively, at least on the same coast; not so much for Thomas and Margaret Gage who got split up between Yale and San Diego; Epes Sargent II is in New York and his wife Catherine, is still in the family; Theodore Atkinson is at the Rhode Island School of Design and his wife, Frances, is at Crystal Bridges in Arkansas. Copley&#8217;s idea to put a couple on one canvas was a bold idea, with plenty of art historical precedents but none that he would have seen. He used big canvas