Currently on View at the Art Institute of Chicago

John Singleton Copley

Date: 1770–72

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Art Acquisition Endowment Fund

Object number: 2000.6

Text Entries: Ostensibly commissioned on the occasion of her marriage at the age of eighteen, the portrait of the young Mrs. John Stevens serves as a commemoration of her youth and beauty and of her family's wealth. Fashionable in her uncorseted, draped satin dress and an exotic "oriental" turban on her head, she balances on her leg a basket of flowers, emblematic of love, beauty and fecundity. Today, the portrait, with its inclusion of formulaic associations to the "feminine," seems ironic: already a diligent diarist, Judith Sargent later became one of Boston's most celebrated writers and an activist for women's equality. Similar in subject is Frederick MacMonnies' painting of the young, intelligent and wealthy Alice Jones. MacMonnies depicts his future wife's fashionable persona; dressed in an elaborate, feathered hat and brilliant red dress, she sits against a blue-green tapestry in his studio. Rather than using emblems to convey meaning, MacMonnies' handling of paint-the bravura brushstrokes-not only animate the composition but also suggests the intensity of the sitter's personality. Yet, MacMonnies, like Copley, concerns himself less with a character study than with the external realities of the sitter's beauty and social position.