AFA Autumn 2021

Autumn 76 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com John Singleton Copley (1738–1815), Mrs. Andrew Tyler (Mary Richards), ca. 1765–1767. Pastel on paper mounted on canvas, H. 27¼, W. 22½ inches. Gift of Captain George Jackson Tyler, 1850 (R0010). On March 20, 1745/46, sixteen-year-old Mary Richards (1731–1783) of Dedham, Massachusetts, married Reverend Andrew Tyler (1719–1777), a graduate of Harvard in the class of 1738 and the second minister of the Clapboard Trees Parish in Dedham from 1743 until his dismissal in 1772 for his royalist sympathies. She was the daughter of Colonel Joseph Richards, a physician, and Mary Belcher. The Tylers hired colonial America’s greatest portrait painter, John Singleton Copley (1735–1815), to capture this like-ness of Mary in about 1765. At the time, she was in her mid-30s, and Copley shows her in a blue dress with a pink mantle and a circlet of pearls around her neck. Jules David Prown noted that Copley painted Mrs. Tyler at a time when he “had hit his stride in the medium” of pastel. The Tylers knew Copley’s family socially, and in 1777 their daughter, also Mary—one of their nine children—married Charles Pelham, Copley’s half-brother. The portraits of Andrew (not shown) and Mary Tyler descended in the family to their grandson, George Jackson Tyler, who presented them to New England Historic Genealogical Society in 1850, only a few years after its founding.