A Copley Portrait and the Story Behind It

Last month the Pook & Pook art auction house in Pennsylvania sold two paintings of a little girl named Priscilla Greenleaf (and her dog).

One, attributed to Joseph Badger and dated about 1750, went for $20,000, or double the top range of its estimate. 

The other, an early work by John Singleton Copley, sold for $500,000, or more than six times the initial estimate. That’s what appears in this thumbnail.

The Copley portrait, which Pook & Pook dated to about 1757, was posthumous. That’s because Priscilla had probably died in 1750, soon after Badger painted her.

John Greenleaf, the children’s father, was an apothecary. As D. Brenton Simons wrote in Witches, Rakes, and Rogues, when his eleven-month-old son died in January of that year, soon after the deaths of his daughters, he suspected poison.

Greenleaf accused a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old girl he enslaved, Phillis Hammond, of giving the baby arsenic. Arrested and under pressure, she confessed to killing John, Jr., and Elizabeth. The family believed she killed Priscilla as well. The newspapers published little about the case, not even the Greenleaf name.

Phillis Hammond pled guilty to murdering baby John that spring. She was sentenced to death. The Boston Evening Post reported, “Her Mother died with Excess of Grief.” Phillis was hanged on 16 May 1751. The Rev. Dr. Mather Byles preached at the execution. Some printer issued a broadside with a crude woodcut and verse titled “The bitter Effects of Sin,” the source for Phillis’s surname.

The Greenleafs had Badger’s portraits of Priscilla and Elizabeth to remember their daughters. (The latter is now in the collection of Colonial Williamsburg.) But evidently they wanted an image of their murdered son, and for the pictures to match.

John Singleton Copley was still a teenager himself when the Greenleafs commissioned him to paint all three of their lost children. The pictures of Elizabeth and John are now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The museum website says of the boy’s outfit: “Copley’s source for John’s exotic cap and pose was a print after Sir Godfrey Kneller’s portrait of Lord Bury as a child.” Likewise, though his picture of Priscilla followed Badger in posing the little girl with a dog, he may have used a European print as a better model.