Nicholas Boylston (1716-1771)

John Singleton Copley began his extraordinary transnational painting career in his late teens. Before he and his family left for London in 1775, Copley created luxurious likenesses of prominent Anglo-colonials in Boston. He combined detailed renderings of faces and garments with invented settings to aggrandize the wealth and status of the sitters’ families. In 1766, Copley was commissioned to paint portraits of the Boylston family. In this portrait of Nicholas Boylston, the sitter is shown wearing a satin negligee cap and a sumptuous, silk brocade “banyan”—a kimono-inspired garment that conveyed cosmopolitan tastes and access to global markets. The Boylstons had amassed a fortune by trading enslaved Africans, Asian ceramics and textiles, and Peruvian silver to and from London markets and the ports in the empire, through the Boylston and Green Shipping Company. The large ledgers on the table and the company ship in the background allude to the source of the family’s wealth while obscuring the systems of exploitation on which that wealth accrued.