Boston-born John Singleton Copley was colonial America's leading artist and first great portrait painter. His style of directness, intimacy, austerity, and subdued color strengthened the emphasis on human character. Mary Toppan Pickman, the daughter of a prominent physician in Salem, Massachusetts, sat for the portrait a year after her marriage to Benjamin Pickman, whom Copley painted several years earlier (1966.79.2). Showing her in a fashionable dress of satin and lace, Copley captures both her stylish presence and her youthful dignity. When Benjamin left for England in 1775, Mary stayed behind in Salem, attending to the education of their four children and managing the estate during her husband's ten-year absence.