Catherine Greene (1769): Art, History and Details

Catherine Greene (1769) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is John Singleton Copley (American, born The Thirteen Colonies, 1738–1815).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The Boston painter Copley's virtuosity at rendering luxurious textiles was precisely the kind of talent that appealed to his patrons. In 1769 the prosperous merchant John Greene commissioned a portrait of himself and this portrait of his wife, Catherine (1735–1785), after thirteen years of marriage. Shown at the age of 34, Mrs. Greene wears a fanciful costume inspired by ancient styles, strikes a pose derived from an English engraving, and pretends to lean against a rock that looks as insubstantial as a theatrical prop. This likeness places Mrs. Greene in an ideal realm far removed from mundane matters. The frame is original.

Object facts

• Title: Catherine Greene
• Date: 1769
• Creator attribution: John Singleton Copley (American, born The Thirteen Colonies, 1738–1815)
• Culture: America
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 145.5 x 121 x 7 cm (57 5/16 x 47 5/8 x 2 3/4 in.); Unframed: 125.7 x 101 cm (49 1/2 x 39 3/4 in.)
• Collection: American - Painting
• Department: American Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1915.527

A detail from the museum

Small, shimmering pearls in the woman's hair and on her sleeves add an opulent touch to this portrait.

Collection credit

Gift of the John Huntington Art and Polytechnic Trust

Further reading listed by the museum

• Perkins, Augustus Thorndike. A Sketch of the Life and a List of Some of the Works of John Singleton Copley. Boston: Priv. Print, 1873.
• Clarke, Louise Brownell, George Sears Greene, and F. V. Greene. The Greenes of Rhode Island: With Historical Records of English Ancestry, 1534-1902. New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1903.
• Bayley, Frank W. The Life and Works of John Singleton Copley: founded on the Work of Augustus Thorndike Perkins. Boston: Taylor Press, 1915.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.