John Singleton Copley (1738 - 1815) was an American painter, born presumably in Boston, Massachusetts and a son of Richard and Mary Singleton Copley, both Irish.
He is famous for his portrait paintings of important figures in colonial New England, depicting in particular middle-class subjects. His paintings were innovative in their tendency to depict artifacts relating to these individuals' lives.
Copley's mother in his early boyhood kept a tobacco shop on Long Wharf. The parents, who according to the artist's granddaughter, Martha Babcock Amory, came to Boston in 1736, were "engaged in trade, like almost all the inhabitants of the North American colonies at that time". The father was from Limerick; the mother, of the Singletons of County Clare, a family of Lancashire origin.
Letters from John Singleton, Mrs. Copley's father, are in the Copley-Pelham collection. Richard Copley, described as a tobacconist, is said by several biographers to have arrived in Boston in ill health and to have gone, about the time of John's birth, to the West Indies, where he died. William H. Whitmore gives his death as of 1748, the year of Mrs. Copley's remarriage.
On August 18, 1815, Copley had a paralytic stroke. He seemed at first to recover. Late in August his prognosis was favorable to his painting again. A second shock occurred, however, and he died on September 9, 1815. He was buried in Highgate Cemetery in a tomb belonging to the Hutchinson family. - wikipedia
