John Singleton Copley
John Bours
, about 1760–62

Technical Notes
The painting’s support is a plain-weave canvas with an average of fifteen threads per centimeter horizontally and thirteen threads per centimeter vertically. The canvas shows pronounced cusping along all four edges.

There are small tears throughout. Canvas inserts were used to repair losses between the chair legs in the bottom center, on the edge of the book, and in the lower left on the coat tails, where there is also a branched tear.

The warm white ground was evenly applied. Earlier conservation reports record the presence of a red priming layer that had penetrated through the weave to the back of the canvas. Further investigation is necessary to determine the exact construction of the ground layers.

The paint surface, which is in a very good state of preservation, shows a range of textures and variations in brushwork. In general Copley began with thin applications of dark paint, on top of which he applied thicker layers of body colors. The chair and the architectural background are thinly painted, whereas the figure and landscape background are more thickly painted. Copley used thick, painterly brushstrokes in the highlights and low impasto in the white areas of the shirt cuffs, cravat, buckle, and clouds. The hands have an underlayer of dark brownish-red paint, which appears to be the same color that Copley used for the chair. He then added a pink flesh color to the hands, followed by thicker applications of warmer flesh tones applied with visible brushstrokes using a wet-on-wet technique. Copley similarly worked from dark to light in painting the costume, and he created the shimmer of the fabric without glazing.

The paint surface shows signs of weave emphasis and flattening of impasto that are probably the result of past lining treatments. The paint in the face shows some wrinkling, which may have been caused by the materials and/or techniques used by Copley.

Scattered flake losses occur throughout the surface. Larger losses include a twenty-centimeter-long area of damage from the fingers of the proper right to the waistcoat, and a forty-three-centimeter-long area along the right edge of the canvas.

The painting was last cleaned in 1974, and a surface coating was applied that consisted of "1 part B-67, 1 part B-72, and 1 part n-butyl methacrylate and a small amount of damar resin varnish." Spray coatings were then applied of Acryloid B-72 and PVA AYAF. In 1995 the painting was surface cleaned and resaturated with Winton Gloss Varnish and Winton Retouch Varnish.

Frame Notes
The baroque-style frame consists of a carved and gilded, Eastern white pine molding made in two pieces and attached with nails; hand-forged nails are visible along the back panels at the corners.1 The corners are mitered.

The inner edge of the frame is decorated with shallow carving. There is a central band of sandwork and a wide outer band with shallow carved scroll-and-foliate ornament on the attached ogee molding. The frame also has carved corner straps and a thin band of foliate design on the upper edge of the back panel. The back panel was originally finished with yellow bole and was not gilded.

The frame closely resembles the frames on Joseph Blackburn’s Hannah Babcock (Mrs. John Bours) and Joseph Badger’s Faith Savage Waldo (Mrs. Cornelius Waldo) and Cornelius Waldo. At least thirteen other portraits by Copley are framed in a similar manner.2

Notes
1. Wood identification is based on a scientific analysis of the cell structure by dendrologist R. Bruce Hoadley, January 5, 2000.

2. Heckscher 1995, 145 and 158–59 n. 11.