Elizabeth emily garland biography

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

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