John Singleton Copley

Born in Boston in 1738, John Singleton Copley rose from humble beginnings to become one of the most celebrated portrait painters of his era. His mother, Mary Singleton Copley, owned a tobacco shop, and after his father's death, she remarried Peter Pelham, a painter and engraver. It's believed that young Copley learned the fundamentals of art in Pelham's household, which also ran an evening writing and arithmetic school. Despite Copley's later claims of being largely self-tau…