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John Singleton Copley: A Retrospective Exhibition

September 19 – October 31, 1965
Ground Floor, Central Gallery

John Singleton Copley, The Copley Family, 1776/1777, oil on canvas, Andrew W. Mellon Fund, 1961.7.1

This exhibition is no longer on view at the National Gallery.

Overview: 103 paintings, drawings, and prints were assembled from more than 50 collections in the United States and England, including the British royal collection. Jules David Prown of Yale University arranged the exhibition to mark the 150th anniversary of Copley's death. Further showings were not possible because of Boston's policy of not lending to an exhibition traveling to more than 2 other institutions. William P. Campbell was the Gallery coordinator.

The Gallery provided facilities for the ceremony held by the Post Office Department on September 17, 1965 for the first-day issue of the 5-cent stamp in the Fine Arts Series. It featured a detail from The Copley Family.

Attendance: 46,532

Catalog: John Singleton Copley, 1738-1815, by Jules David Prown. Washington, DC, New York, Boston: National Gallery of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Museum of Fine Arts, 1965.

Other Venues: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, November 20, 1965–January 2, 1966
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, January 22–March 6, 1966

Copley, John Singleton
American, 1738 - 1815