Art Quote -- The Art of Seeing

Fig1, John Singleton Copley’s A Boy with a Flying Squirrel 1765

“It took me nine minutes to notice that the shape of the boy’s ear precisely echoes that of the ruff along the squirrel’s belly—and that Copley was making some kind of connection between the animal and the human body and the sensory capacities of each. It was 21 minutes before I registered the fact that the fingers hold-ing the chain exactly span the diameter of the water glass beneath them. It took a good 45 minutes before I realized that the seem-ingly random folds and wrinkles in the background curtain are actually perfect copies of the shapes of the boy’s ear and eye, as if Copley had imagined those sensory organs distributing or im-printing themselves on the surface behind him. And so on.” – Jennifer Roberts, The Power of Patience