126.05 x 100.33 cm (49 5/8 x 39 1/2 in.)
Oil on canvas

Classification: Paintings

On view in the: Studio Craft/Lee Gallery (1W02)

Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814) would become one of the first chroniclers of the American Revolution and a dedicated campaigner for the patriot cause; however, when Copley painted her, at the age of about thirty-six or thirty-seven, she was a Plymouth, Massachusetts, housewife and mother of three sons (two more were to be born between 1764 and 1766). Her upbringing was unusual for a woman in the colonies, for she was well educated - her parents, James and Mary Alleyne Otis (whose portraits, now in the Wichita Art Museum, Copley had painted about 1758), had allowed her to attend her older brother's lessons with a tutor as he prepared for Harvard. She had an unconventional marriage too: her husband James Warren, a graduate of Harvard, a prosperous merchant and farmer, and an ardent patriot, also encouraged her intellectual pursuits.

Mercy Otis Warren began writing poetry in about 1759, five years after her marriage, but it was not until 1772 and the pseudonymous publication of her satiric drama "The Adulateur" in the "Massachusetts Spy" that her work reached the public. Over the next several decades she would pen a series of plays and parodies mocking Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson and other Loyalists, essays on political issues, and a volume of poems and dramas written in defense of human liberty and dedicated to George Washington. In 1805 she published her three-volume "History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution," which she had begun in the late 1770s and which, unlike most of her earlier efforts, appeared under her own name.

In Copley's image Mercy Warren does not allude to her budding literary ambitions, but rather enacts prescribed feminine roles. Her portrait offers a graceful complement to that of her husband [see 31.211]. Their heads are turned toward each other, and she is slightly lower in the picture plane than he. Her body is in profile, and she is dressed in a most fashionable blue satin sacque dress trimmed with ruched silk and silver braid, with a lace stole and lace ruffles at her sleeve. Both the Warrens are portrayed as cultivators: he, the gentleman farmer, stands foursquare on his property; she fingers her nasturtium vines, plants that were valued as food and for their bright, colorful blossoms. Nasturtiums were also symbolic of patriotism and thus a prophetic choice of flower for this sitter.
Copley first portrayed Mercy Otis Warren with roses - their ghosts can still be seen beneath the green nasturtium leaves - flowers that were more appropriate for cutting and arranging than nasturtiums. X rays of the portrait suggest the possibility that Mrs. Warren originally stood before a masonry wall. The revisions in the setting allied Warren more directly with the world of nature; the flowers she tends, but does not cut, are a trope for her role within the family as nurturer of children. Like the cultivation of flowers, the training of children was the responsibility of women. Flowers were emblems of fertility - appropriate to Mercy Warren, who gave birth to sons both the year before and the year after she sat for Copley. But they were also tokens of the fragility of life and may have been meant to recall Warren's beloved sister Mary ("Mrs. John Gray," Massachusetts Historical Society), who died the year this portrait was painted.

Mercy Warren's dress appears in two other portraits by Copley: "Mrs. Benjamin Pickman (Mary Toppan)" (1763, Yale University Art Gallery), and "Mrs. Daniel Sargent (Mary Turner)" (1763, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco). Mrs. Pickman and Mrs. Sargent were much younger than Mercy Warren, and were painted at the time of their marriages. Art historian Margaretta Lovell has suggested that the expensive blue dress belonged to the Warrens and that they loaned the dress to Mrs. Pickman and Mrs. Sargent for the purpose of wearing it for their portraits, augmenting it with different trimmings but emphasizing family friendships and alliances (Margaretta M. Lovell, "Mrs. Sargent, Mr. Copley, and the Empirical Eye," "Winterthur Portfolio," vol. 33, no. 1, Spring, 1998, pp. 34). The gown is cut low, and in the portraits of both young sitters, the pale skin of their chests is exposed in advertisement of their beauty. Mercy Warren's costume, however, has been augmented with a lace stole, a modest touch appropriate to her age and status as matron. She looks directly at the viewer; and the levelness of her gaze and the determined set of her mouth suggest (at least to the modern observer with the luxury of hindsight) the side of her character that will within a decade venture forth from the realm of such acceptable feminine pursuits as gardening and child rearing into the masculine sphere of dramaturgy, political satire, and historical analysis.

The text has been adapted by Janet Comey from Carol Troyen's entry in Carrie Rebora, et al, "John Singleton Copley in America," exh. cat., New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Harry N. Abrams, 1995.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Bequest of Winslow Warren, 1931
Accession number: 31.212

Provenance/Ownership History: The artist; the sitter; descended in the family to Winslow Warren, Dedham, Mass.; to MFA, 1931, bequest of Winslow Warren.

This object is included in the following Selected Tour(s):

• American Paintings
• MFA Images: Portraiture
• MFA Images: Women in Art
• Colonial New England, 1730–1790