Description
Mary Sherburne sits in a luminous pale gown with a red wrap in Copley’s Mrs. Jerathmael Bowers, painted about 1763. A landscape opens behind the figure, giving her formal presentation a broader setting. The arrangement follows a British mezzotint after Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of Lady Caroline Russell, with Copley replacing the face with his own sitter’s likeness. Individual identity enters an established model of fashionable portraiture.
That combination makes the portrait more complex than a straightforward record of appearance. Pose and setting participate in a language already associated with another sitter, while the face anchors the image in Mary Bowers’s own life. Copley’s adaptation demonstrates how printed images could carry portrait conventions across the Atlantic. The result allows the viewer to consider both the person represented and the visual choices through which her social presence was shaped.
Read our guide to giclée prints or browse the John Singleton Copley collection.
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