Book Review: A Revolution in Color

A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley
Biography
Jane Kamensky

Maybe it's the title. I wanted A Revolution in Color to do something, well, revolutionary--or, at least, revelatory. Something about Copley's painting, perhaps, comparable to the outstanding Eye of the Beholder. Or something about his life, or his times, or politics, or art, or . . . something about something, anyway.

Instead, A Revolution in Color is a basic standard biography. If Copley had kept a diary, and Kamensky had written a book based on it, this is more or less what you'd get. Date, event, painting, reaction, marriage, interaction, repeat. It's mildly interesting to read about Revolutionary-era Boston through a comparatively conservative lens--although I think Kamensky overstates the latter--but that doesn't particularly require, or shed light on, Copley's art.

Every so often it looks like Kamensky is trying to establish a theme around African-Americans (and African-Britons). She makes repeated references to black people's experiences, their presence in Copley's life, their presentation in art, and so forth. To the extent that this rescues the black experience from enforced anonymity, that's great. But in the context of A Revolution in Color, none of it adds up to anything. Kamensky never sustains the subject, nor does she bring to it a coherent story of what it meant to Copley. Yes, he would have known black people. Yes, he sometimes depicted them. Yes, they were unjustly enslaved and erased from history. And . . . ?

Also, Kamensky's writing is not flawless. Late in the book she shifts repeatedly between the past tense and the presence, to no very good effect. She also needs to learn the use of "would" rather than "will" to indicate that an event is in the reader's past but in the future of the moment she's describing. (Example: "In 1905 Einstein published a paper on the photoelectric effect; he would win the Nobel Prize for it in 1922.")

This isn't to say A Revolution in Color is valueless. It's an OK resource for learning about Copley and about his artistic milieu. As anything more than that, it doesn't live up to the title.