Colonel William Fitch and His Sisters Sarah and Ann Fitch

John Singleton Copley

National Gallery of Art

Two women reach for or touch the arm of a man wearing a uniform and standing next to a chestnut-brown horse in front of a deep landscape in this horizontal painting. All three people have pale skin with oval faces, rosy cheeks, long, straight noses, cleft chins, and their mouths are closed. The horse and man fill most of the right half of the composition. The horse’s back is as high as the man’s shoulder, and it stands with its rear angled to our right and its front legs behind the man. It turns its head to look off to our right, its black mane and tail flaring like blazes. The man rests his arm straight across the saddle on the horse’s back. He looks off to our left almost in profile, and his wavy gray hair is wind tousled. His vivid red jacket has silver epaulets, two rows of silver buttons down the front, a high, yellow collar, and yellow cuffs. A black band is wrapped around his neck over a white cloth, the upper edge of which is visible tucked up under his chin. A white strap holding a sword crosses his chest, and a dark rose-pink sash is tied over his coat, around his waist. The tail of the coat falls to his knees, and he wears ivory-white, tightly fitting breeches over knee-high black boots with silver spurs. He wears a pale yellow glove on the hand to our right, which rests on the horse, and holds the second glove and a black hat with the other hand. That arm angles slightly from his body toward the women. Up on a step, the woman closer to the man stands with her body facing us though she looks off to our right. She wears a black dress with elbow-length sleeves and a frilly white collar. Her brown hair is pulled up and back, and curls frame her face. She rests her left arm, to our right, on the man’s upper arm and holds a closed pine-green parasol with her other hand down in front of her body. The other woman stands with her body facing our right in profile, but she turns her face slightly to also look off to our right. She wears a white gown, head wrap, and long white veil. Brown curls peek out from under the head covering. She touches the veil with her left hand, farther from us, and reaches toward the man’s hand with her other. An oversized urn sits on a hip-high wall to the left of the women, and trees grow up the left edge of the painting. The distant landscape has sage-green hills, dark green trees, and rocky mountains along the horizon, which comes about a third of the way up the composition. Clouds create a diagonal and across the blue sky above, which transition to peach along the horizon.