The 1771 portrait by John Singleton Copley of Capt. Gabriel Maturin
A pre-revolutionary American portrait by John Singleton Copley, the portrait artist born in Boston of Irish parents around 1798, comes up at Bonhams in New York on May 21. The long-lost 1771 portrait of Captain Gabriel Maturin was painted four years before the American Revolution during Copley’s six-month stay in New York. Itemised in his 1771 list of New York commissions the painting was discovered in the US and identified in 2011. It is estimated at $500,000-700,000. Copley’s brief stay in New York was the artist’s only venture outside of Boston prior to his permanent departure in 1774 for Italy, and ultimately London.
Kayla Carlsen, Bonhams Senior Specialist in American Art, commented: “Copley’s New York paintings are of special interest because they represent an aspect of American society now largely lost from view, namely the estimated one-third of the American populace that remained loyal to the King. Many of Copley’s portraits from this period were lost in the tumult of the American Revolutionary War, making this discovery all the more extraordinary.”
Captain Gabriel Maturin was Aide de Camp to the Commander in Chief of His Majesty’s Armed Forces in America, Major General Thomas Gage. Captain Maturin was Gage’s closest Aide and effectively his chief of staff, who came from a French Huguenot family by way of Ireland. Military service brought Maturin to New York in 1756, where he settled permanently and married into a New Jersey branch of the Livingston family.