“Exhibition of the Rejected”: John Singleton Copley and the American View on 18th Century Artistic Institutions

Abstract

This article looks into “The Death of the Earl of Chatham,” a painting by John Singleton Copley, and compares the artist’s experience of exhibiting it in 1781 to that of the then newly founded Royal Academy of Arts. Copley arrived in Europe at the age of 36 and while he had no professional training as an artist, he turned out to be one of the grandest reformers of art in his time. It was Copley’s works that brought to life the principles of historical art put forward in the context of neoclassicism by Benjamin West, and “The death of the Earl of Chatham” is the quintessential work that signified a reform in its genre, augmented by its truly modernistic, revolutionary manner of presentation. This painting was one of the first of a series of artistic statements in opposition to the hierarchies in the art world, and can be considered a completely novel phenomenon in both its artistic contents and its form of viewer interaction. “The death of the Earl of Chatham” can be considered a prologue to the rhetoric of Courbet and the impressionists, yet it was created almost a hundred years before them. Similarly to Courbet’s “The Pavilion of Realism,” the exhibit of “The death of the Earl of Chatham” was the painter’s attempt to solidify his new social status, gain freedom in his selection of art theme, form of artistic expression, and remove third parties between the viewer and the artist. This article reviews the scale of change that Copley and his “The Death of the Earl of Chatham” brought to the art community and attempts to explain why this experiment remained on the fringe of academic art and did not produce many followers.