John Singleton Copley (American, 1738–1815)
Woodbury Langdon, 1767
Oil on canvas
49 3/4 x 40 in. (126.36 x 101.6 cm)
The Eugene and Margaret McDermott Art Fund, Inc., 1996.70.1.McD

Sarah Sherburne Langdon, 1767
Oil on canvas
49 3/4 x 39 3/4 in. (126.36 x 100.96 cm)
The Eugene and Margaret McDermott Art Fund, Inc., 1996.70.2.McD

John Singleton Copley emerged as the leading portrait painter in Boston during the colonial period. Primarily self-taught, Copley benefited from his early work in mezzotints with his stepfather, Peter Pelham, and from exposure to the paintings of the portraitist John Smibert, whose studio was located only a few blocks away. From the 1740s, Robert Feke, John Greenwood, and Joseph Blackburn all worked in Boston, forming with the young Copley a network of up-and-coming artists who would define American painting as a rich blend of cosmopolitan style and provincial mannerisms.

Throughout the 1750s, Copley’s style became increasingly fluid, leaving behind the more wooden conventions common to early colonial art. The decade of the 1760s represents Copley’s arrival at a mature style with an emphasis on sumptuous fabrics and lifelike flesh tones. Between 1765 and 1774, Copley created the best of his American portraits, paintings more accomplished than any he could have seen in Boston or New York. The Langdon portraits were painted the year before Copley’s masterpiece, Paul Revere (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).

Woodbury Langdon was among the youngest and the wealthiest of the merchants of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The same age as Copley, Langdon had married Sarah Sherburne when she was sixteen, in 1765. Copley’s portraits of the Langdons demonstrate the young artist’s growing command of his medium. Woodbury Langdon’s casual stance, his elbow resting on a pedestal topped by a large antique urn, bespeaks the ease with which he ran his thriving mercantile business and his household affairs. Sarah Langdon, dressed in an uncorseted satin gown, stands demurely before a curtain and formal landscape, projecting a warmth and directness found in Copley’s most accomplished work. The Langdons prospered in subsequent years. Following the Revolution, Woodbury Langdon served first as a delegate to the Constitutional Congress, and later as a Supreme Court judge in New Hampshire. Sarah Langdon raised ten children, five sons and five daughters, and outlived her husband by twenty-two years. These portraits remained in the family until their purchase for the Museum.