It was his sisters' needlework that first attracted John Trumbull to art. His father found the attraction inappropriate on two counts: first, young John had lost the use of one eye in a childhood accident, and second, he was a gentleman. Picturemaking, for the handsome son of the governor of Connecticut, was unthinkable. Accordingly, odd John was packed off to Harvard for polishing. There, however, he called on the greatest of American portraitists, John Singleton Copley, and painted and copied all the pictures he could. He was one of the first male American...
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