In this life of painter John Singleton Copley, Jane Kamensky untangles the web of principles and interests that shaped the age of America’s revolution. Copley’s talent earned him the patronage of Boston’s leaders but he did not share their politics and painting portraits failed to satisfy his lofty artistic goals. A British subject who lamented America’s provincialism, Copley looked longingly across the Atlantic. When resistance escalated into war, he was in London. A painter of America’s revolution as Britain’s American War, the magisterial canvases he created made him one of the towering figures of the British art scene. Kamensky brings Copley’s world alive and explores the fraught relationships between liberty and slavery, family duty and personal ambition, legacy and posterity—tensions that characterised the era of the American Revolution and that beset us still.

Prizes

Winner of New-York Historical Society American History Book Prize 2017,Winner of Massachusetts Book Award 2017,Winner of James Bradford Biography Prize 2016,Winner of Annibel Jenkins Biography Prize 2017,Short-listed for George Washington Book Prize 2017,Short-listed for PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography 2017,Short-listed for Marfield Prize for Arts Writing 2017

"Jane Kamensky has not only crafted a stunning biography but also a truly singular account of The American Revolution. A Revolution in Color masterfully unravels any easy distinctions between patriots and loyalists." -- Amanda Foreman
"... I commend Kamensky's skill as a writer. Even if you had little interest in such a man as Copley, this is a deeply enjoyable book." -- David Aaronovitch, Book of the Week - The Times
"... lively and insightful book... Kamensky has produced an exemplary historical biography... A Revolution in Color is a thumping good read and makes a significant contribution to our appreciation of the often misunderstood and underappreciated Copley." -- Loyd Grossman - The Burlington Magazine

Jane Kamensky is the author of A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley, winner of the New-York Historical Society’s American History Book Prize, and professor emerita of history at Harvard University. She is the president of Monticello/the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and has previously served as director of the Schlesinger Library at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.