Portrait of Mrs. Roland Cotton

A native of Boston, Copley was the most popular and successful portrait painter in the British North American colonies, widely praised for his ability to capture likeness with painterly virtuosity. He studied prints to emulate the style of British portraits prized by the colonists.

Deborah Cotton, née Mason, sat for this portrait when she was thirty-three, three years after her marriage to Roland Cotton, a lawyer from Sandwich, Massachusetts. This painting was half of a pair that the couple commissioned as a gift for their minister at the First Church of Sandwich. The pendant portrait of Roland is now lost. The portrait of Deborah passed by descent through the minister’s family before being donated to the Davis Museum by Alice Hayden, Class of 1912, in honor of the college’s centennial and the nation’s bicentennial.