An American "Duchess" in Disguise: John Singleton Copley's Turquerie Portrait of Margaret Kemble Gage
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A number of portraits that John Singleton Copley painted in the years prior to the American Revolution show women clad in turquerie. Traditionally, art historians have explained the appearance of this fashion as provincial colonials copying fashions from their parent country. The appeal of the fashion was strong; however, the political, social, and sexual connotations complicate this explanation for the sitters' choice of dress. While the purpose here is not to disprove the explanation of fashion-consciousness, it is to read these portraits from the perspective of the colonized rather than the colonizer. It is an attempt to decode an appropriated imperial fashion and to acknowledge the potentially subversive character of the portraits. Positioned as a sample of the masterful union of the native and the imagined, the perceived and the conjured, the unique and the culturally prescribed, Margaret Gage (1771) provides a significant opportunity to interrogate seemingly irreconcilable social, political, and artistic elements in order to better understand Copley's ways of seeing and his working methods, as well as, his subject's personal beliefs. Margaret Gage is an expression of both colonial and national identity at a time when those identities were very much contested.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".