Portrait of Thomas Gage
painting by John Singleton Copley
Portrait of Thomas Gage is a 1768 portrait painting by the American artist John Singleton Copley depicting the British general Thomas Gage.
Gage was Commander-in-Chief of the British Army in North America having served there during the Seven Years' War. Gage was paying a visit from his headquarters in New York to Boston where Copley was based. The commission marked an important step forward in Copley's career. He depicts the general in the style Joshua Reynolds used for military portraits.
Once completed, Gage hung it prominently in his house in Broad Street in New York. Gage then shipped it to London where it hung in the general's residence in Arlington Street in Piccadilly and was widely admired, a further encouragement for Copley's later move to Britain.
Today it is in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art in Connecticut. Copley also painted his American-born wife Margaret Kemble Gage a few years later in his Mrs. Thomas Gage.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q23746105. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1768.
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This entry incorporates text from “Portrait of Thomas Gage” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.