Boston in the 1740s: a bustling port at the edge of the British empire. A boy comes of age in a small wooden house along the Long Wharf, which juts into the harbor, as though reaching for London thousands of miles across the ocean. Sometime in his childhood, he learns to draw. That boy was John Singleton Copley, who became, by the 1760s, colonial America's premier painter. His brush captured the faces of his neighbors--ordinary men like Paul...