Late Copley

It's common to see the paintings of John Singleton Copley's late years as a series of embarrassing failures.  He aged badly, we are told, losing his eyesight, his skills and his mental acuity.  I think that the way art history views late Copley says more about art history's lack of understanding than it does about Copley.

First of all, late Copley is often compared to late Benjamin West, Copley's contemporary and rival, as precipitous fall from grace compares to gentle decline.  But that's absurd.  The entire second half of West's career is more ridiculous than any stage of Copley's career.  West was a great court painter, even a court painter of real genius, who never fell from grace.   Because West never fell from grace and Copley did, West is never pitied and the ridiculousness of his late work is never really seen.  As West's  artistic vision fell prey to some of the same contradictions that Copley struggled with, he seemed to disappear, artistically speaking, into a Fuseli-influenced  fog of second rate romanticism, featuring bombastic excursions into Shakespeare.  Here is an example of West's later works, Eagle Bringing Cup to Psyche,  one of his better late pieces ...

It's a lovely painting, a suggestive journey into the darker corners of the mind, but it's hardly a dignified painting.  Another great late West painting sets a romantic mood that reminds me a little of Watteau ...

It's a lovely, but weird,  painting -- hardly dignified.

For comparison, The Battle of the Pyrenees is a little known late painting of Copley's, painted almost at the end of his life when he supposedly could barely paint at all.   I think it's quite an amazing painting.

 No, it's not a graceful paean to the glories of war.  But the thing is, Copley NEVER did that.  Yes, he TRIED.  He tried very hard to glorify war, just as he tried to glorify the powerful makers of war, but he could never do it.  To my eyes, what this painting shows is the horror of war.  A supercilious and clueless commander seems to direct his forces into battle, but is pointing aimlessly in the wrong direction.  Two aides appear to be callow youths.  Unsure of their superior officer's grasp of the situation they nevertheless seem to hurry about at his command.  In the background the grunts, the workaday soldiers,  are marching into the smoke and fire of hell.   Yes, Copley intended to flatter and glorify, but the artist in him would not let him do that.  He had to paint the truth and his truth was horror of war.  His father seems to have died as just such a grunt in one of the many 18th century wars between Britain and France.

The Battle of the Pyranees isn't a weak painting.  It's a  powerful painting that has been misunderstood.  The man, Copley, was practically on his deathbed when he painted this?!  Incredible. Late but great, if you ask me.

 Like West, Copley's late works seemed to become dreams and nightmares, but like Goya, Copley's dreams and nightmares remained incisive and perceptive commentaries on the world around him.  Copley's take was always more ambivalent than Goya's late work, but this had to do with the difference of their situations.  If anything, Copley's ambivalence makes his work, in some ways at least, even more poignant than Goya's works.  Goya at least knows exactly who the real  bad guys are - the French.   It's so much less clear to Copley, living in the heart of the Empire.

George iv Painted When Prince of Wales  is invariably exhibit A in any narrative of Copley's decline.   Finished not many years before Copley's death, it's clearly not the work of a feeble hand...

Commentators deride this painting because it does not achieve it's ostensible goal of flattering the Prince of Wales.  What they don't see is what it does do.   The Prince seems more vainglorious than glorious, doesn't he?   His commanding wave looks more like a gesture towards a stage set and his soldiers look like toy soldiers.  The officers behind him seem uninspired - well, bored.   The future does not look bright.

I would say that this painting is a near total failure as an attempt at flattery, but as a sendup of the very notion of power itself, it is a bit of a masterpiece.   But it's not a caricature.   The prince is a real person and even a sympathetic figure, perhaps caught up in a process that he doesn't control even as well as his toy horse and toy soldiers.  Again I say - this is supposedly the embarrassingly awful work of a man who has completely lost it?  I think it's a brilliant painting by a man who is less and less able, as he approaches death,  to finesse his dark view of a world whose edenic potential is destroyed by the very notion of power and by the pursuit of power by those whose ambitions produce nightmares.

These are concerns that have never been more relevant than they are today