In the Flesh: John Singleton Copley's Royall Portraits and Whiteness

Between 1758 and 1769, Anglo‐American artist John Singleton Copley (1738–1815) produced three paintings of members of the Royall family, who had more people in bondage than any other family in colonial Massachusetts. Placing these works at the crux of period discourses about the body in the Anglophone world, this essay explores the function and popularity of portraiture in mid‐eighteenth‐century New England. Specifically, it analyses Copley’s techniques for depicting flesh and reads them in relation to nascent formulations of race, arguing that the artist's portraits helped construct whiteness as a perspicacious state and a biological inheritance. They located sensorial capacity in the white body; visualized its transmission across generations; and, thereby, attempted to mitigate the sitters' anxieties about their tenuous place in the racial imaginary. Long understood to mediate the ambivalent relationship between Britain and its American colonies, Copley's portraits emerge here as actors in the distinctly circum‐Atlantic networks that united these regions.