Portrait of Mrs. Rufus Greene

Born Katherine Stanbridge (1709-1768), the sitter in this portrait married Rufus Greene (1707-1777), a Boston silversmith in 1728 and several examples of his work are now in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In 1938, the reverse of the canvas was noted to bear the following inscription, “This picture of Mrs. Rufus Greene was painted by Mr. John Copley in Boston in the year 1760,” a date that is consistent with the style of the portrait as well as the age of the sitter (Barbara Neville Parker and Anne Bolling Wheeler, John Singleton Copley: American Portraits in Oil, Pastel, and Miniature with Biographical Sketches (Boston, 1938), p. 93). Copley also painted her husband and about three years later, their eldest daughter, Katherine (Greene) Amory (1731-1777), a Loyalist noted for her diary written during the early years of the Revolution (the portrait of Mrs. Amory is also at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, acc. no. 37.36). In 1873, the portraits of husband and wife were said to have been damaged by fire and as a result, their canvases cut down (Augustus Thorndike Perkins, Sketch of the Life and a List of Some of the Works of John Singleton Copley (1873), p. 67). As recorded in the publications cited in Literature above, the portrait passed down through the sitter’s descendants in the Amory and Prescott families and along with her husband’s portrait, was owned by Rhode Island senator and Governor, Theodore F. Green (1867-1966) in 1966.