John Singleton Copley was born in Boston in 1738, and grew up there, training in the visual arts under his step-father Peter Pelham (c. 1697-1751), an English engraver who had immigrated in 1727 and married Copley's widowed mother in 1748. Copley's earliest paintings, from the mid-1750s, reveal the influence of English mezzotint portraits as well as the work of local and itinerant artists. He experimented with many media: oil on canvas, miniatures on copper or ivory, pastel, and printmaking. By the late 1750s he was established as a portrait painter. Copley worked in Boston until 1774 with the exception of a six month painting trip to New York City in 1771. By the mid-1760s he wanted to compare his works with those by contemporaries in England, and in 1765 he sent a portrait of his half-brother Henry Pelham, Boy with a Squirrel, to the annual exhibition of the Society of Artists of Great Britain. Encouraged by Benjamin West and Joshua Reynolds, Copley left Boston for study in Europe. He left for London in 1774 and went almost immediately to Italy, where he spent more than a year, studying and painting. He returned to London in 1775, settling there with his wife and three of his children, who had come from Boston.