Copley portraits dating from his 1771 trip to New York City are extremely rare. While the name of Mrs. Paul Richard (Elizabeth Garland, 1700–1774) does not appear on Copley’s subscription list for his New York sojourn, the name of Miles Sherbrook does. Mrs. Richard’s niece Elizabeth Van Taerling married Sherbrook, and Mrs. Richard perhaps met Copley through her nephew by marriage. Of the New York portraits that survive, Mrs. Paul Richard depicts the only dowager.

In his portraits, Copley often posed older women seated in damask-upholstered armchairs, wearing satins usually in a warm brown, with a mobcap and transparent black mantle. Mrs. Richard, here seventy-one years old and a widow of fifteen years, wears a plain apron, a prop that appears in another Copley portrait. She holds an unidentifiable object in her left hand, perhaps a small book, a box, or, more likely, playing cards. Elizabeth Richard’s slightly puffy hands, with their pronounced knuckles, and shadowed, good-humored face, worn with deep crevices, knotted brow, protruding lower lip, and piercing eyes, are closely observed, lifelike details for which Copley portraits were so justly famous.

As the wife of Paul Richard (1697–1756), a wealthy importer and mayor of New York from 1735 to 1739, Elizabeth was a prominent woman. The “only daughter and heiress of Thomas Garland, Gentleman,” and Rachel Garland, she was born in London, May 7, 1700, and moved to the colonies sometime before her marriage to Paul Richard around 1722. Paul Richard makes three references to his wife in his correspondence in the spring of 1746, each time lamenting her poor health. Despite her ill health, Elizabeth lived to be seventy-four, outliving Paul by ten years. Mrs. Richard never remarried and died childless. The Bayou Bend portrait descended to the executor of her will, her nephew Theophylact Bache, who, according to family history, immigrated to the colonies in 1751 at the age of seventeen to help with the Richard merchant business. By a quirk of fate, this portrait was joined with a New York period Copley portrait of Daniel Crommelin Verplanck (1771, MMA) when descendants of the two sitters intermarried in the twentieth century.

Related examples: Similar portraits by Copley include Mrs. Thomas Boylston, 1766, MFA, Boston; Mrs. Sylvanus Bourne, c. 1766, MMA; Mrs. Nathaniel Ellery, c. 1766, MFA, Boston; Mrs. James Russell, c. 1770, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; Mrs. Michael Gill, c. 1770–71, Tate Gallery, London. Similar portraits by British artists include Allan Ramsay, Mary Adam, 1754, Yale Center for British Art. New Haven; and Joseph Wright of Derby, Mrs. John Ashton, c. 1769, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, England. 

Book excerpt: David B. Warren, Michael K. Brown, Elizabeth Ann Coleman, and Emily Ballew Neff. American Decorative Arts and Paintings in the Bayou Bend Collection. Houston: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998.