A Boy with a Flying Squirrel

A Boy with a Flying Squirrel (Henry Pelham), or simply Boy with a Squirrel, is a 1765 painting by the American-born painter John Singleton Copley. The painting depicts Copley's half-brother Henry Pelham with a pet flying squirrel on a table. It is held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Background.
By 1765, Copley established himself as the foremost portrait painter of Boston's mercantile elite. Though he was familiar with European art, Copley had not yet ventured outside New England and was largely self-taught. He was at the time primarily a portraitist, but he desired to become a European-style history painter. To test whether his art met English standards, Copley completed "A Boy with a Flying Squirrel" by early fall 1765, which was to be viewed by a London audience.
Chained squirrels held by women and children were common motifs in colonial American portraits. Besides "A Boy with a Flying Squirrel", Copley also made two other squirrel paintings in 1765: "Boy with a Squirrel, John Bee Holmes" and "Mrs. Theodore Atkinson". According to the American critic Henry Theodore Tuckerman, Copley was "said to have been intimately acquainted with the natural history of this animal, and made pets of several of the species".
"A Boy with a Flying Squirrel" subject, Henry Pelham, was Copley's half-brother. Pelham was born in 1749, the son of Copley's widowed mother, who married Peter Pelham in 1748. Under Copley's tutelage, Pelham became a painter and engraver, as well as Copley's official business manager and assistant. Copley and Pelham held a close and affectionate relationship, as evidenced by a volume of correspondence between the two published in 1914.
Description.
The painting is a portrait of Pelham seated at a table. The boy wears a dark blue coat with a red collar, a yellow waistcoat, and a white collar. His right hand holds onto a gold chain attached to his pet flying squirrel. The squirrel is on the table cracking a nut and sits near a glass of water. Copley rendered a variety of colors and textures, including the red drapery in the background, the highly polished mahogany table, the boy's skin, the squirrel's fur, and the reflections in the glass. Special attention was given to the squirrel, as seen in the meticulous portrayal of its eyes and gliding membrane. In colonial American art, a squirrel eating from a nut was a symbol for patience and perseverance. 
History.
Transatlantic crossing.
"A Boy with a Flying Squirrel" was completed while Copley was still based in Boston, but it needed to be shipped across the Atlantic Ocean for a spring 1766 exhibition in London at the Society of Artists of Great Britain. Copley was aware of the risks of sea passage to artwork; he had previously lost pastels in a shipwreck in the spring of 1765. In letters pertaining specifically to "A Boy with a Flying Squirrel", Copley worried about a "changing of the colours" while the painting was at sea. As such, Copley assembled a team of mercantile aesthetic negotiators to facilitate the safe transport of his painting to London. The painting crossed the Atlantic as part of a Mr. Roger Hale's baggage. Hale then delivered the painting to Captain R. G. Bruce, a friend of Copley's who was living in London. Bruce in turn gave the work to a Lord Cardross who took the work to the studio of Britain's leading painter Joshua Reynolds. The American-born painter Benjamin West was in London at the time and paid a visit to Reynolds's studio to view the painting.
Reception.
Following "A Boy with a Flying Squirrel" 1766 London exhibition, the Society of Artists encouraged Copley to come to London for artistic training and elected him a fellow in recognition of his talent. Bruce eavesdropped on conversations between viewers during the exhibition and interviewed Reynolds on his opinion of the painting—all of which Bruce reported back to Copley. According to Bruce, Reynolds commended the work as a "very wonderfull Performance". Nevertheless, Reynolds and his colleagues noted Copley's overzealous attention to detail, with Reynolds himself describing "a little Hardness in the Drawing, Coldness in the Shades, An over minuteness" in the composition. Reynolds further tempered his enthusiasm for the painting by adding that Copley needed to receive proper training before his "Manner and Taste were corrupted or fixed by working in [his] little way at Boston". "A Boy with a Flying Squirrel" also garnered the attention of Benjamin West, who in a letter to Copley recognized "the great Honour the Picture has gaind you" but found the painting "to ["sic"] liney".
Many 19th-century art critics considered "A Boy with a Flying Squirrel" to be one of Copley's most significant works. According to William Dunlap, the Scottish writer Allan Cunningham judged that "of all that [Copley] ever painted, nothing surpasses his "Boy and Squirrel" for fine depth and beauty of colour". Henry Theodore Tuckerman claimed in 1867 that the painting shaped Copley's "whole future career". More recently in 1976, the American art scholar John Wilmerding wrote that the work was an "early masterpiece and a significant milestone in colonial American art". Some reviewers observed Copley's painting to be more than a portrait. In 1880, Samuel Greene Wheeler Benjamin considered "A Boy with a Flying Squirrel" to be one of the artist's most important history paintings. In 1983, Trevor Fairbrother drew parallels between the painting and "European devotional pictures".
Significance.
Art historian Jennifer Roberts considers "A Boy with a Flying Squirrel" to be "the most consequential painting Copley had yet produced in America". It was Copley's first major noncomissioned work and first exhibition painting. Furthermore, it was Copley's first work for a European audience, and thus his artistic style departed from his previous work. The painting's success in Britain encouraged Copley to make more disciplined portraits in his late American career and likely strengthened his conviction to move to London, which he did in 1774.
Provenance and exhibition.
Copley held onto the painting until his death in 1815, after which the work was inherited by Copley's son John Copley, 1st Baron Lyndhurst. Following the death of Baron Lyndhurst in 1863, an 1864 Christie's auction in London sold the painting to James Sullivan Amory, husband of Copley's granddaughter Mary Copley Greene Amory. The painting was inherited in 1891 by their son Frederic Amory, and in 1928 by Copley's great granddaughter.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, celebrated Copley's bicentennial with a February 1 to March 15, 1938 exhibition that included "A Boy with a Flying Squirrel". From September 19 to October 31, 1965, the painting was part of a Copley exhibition in Washington, D.C., at the National Gallery of Art. The painting was gifted by Copley's great granddaughter to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1978. The museum's annual report for that year described the work as "the most important single gift to the collection in many years". As of 2021, the painting has remained on view in the museum's Saunders Gallery among other works by Copley.