Major George Washington visited Boston in 1755 and sat to young Copley for a miniature. In 1766 Copley sent, without name or address, an exquisite portrait of his half brother, Henry Pelham, known as the "Boy and the Flying Squirrel," to Benjamin West, a fellow countryman then settled in London with a request to have it placed in the Exhibition Rooms of the Society of British Artists. The attention and admiration excited by this wonderful painting were such that the friends of the artist wrote most warmly to persuade him to go to England for the pursuit of his vocation, and West extended to him a pressing invitation to his own home. In 1769 he married Susannah Farnum, daughter of Richard Clarke, a wealthy merchant of Boston, and agent of the East India Company for their trade in that town. The tie between the artist and his wife was peculiarly close. We constantly meet her familiar lineaments through the whole course of Copley's works. Now Mary by the manger, with the Divine Infant at her breast, in "The Nativity," again in "The Family Picture" and in the fabled scene of Venus and Cupid, or in the female group in "The Death of Major Pierson," dissolved in an agony of grief, and fear, as they escape from the scene of violence and death. The locality associated with his married life in Boston was a solitary house on Beacon Hill, chosen with his keen perception of picturesque beauty. His prophecy has been fully verified that the time would come when that situation would become the favorite site for the homes of the wealthy. Singular as it may appear the site selected by Copley was the same as that selected by William Blackstone, the first settler of Boston. In after years Copley's thoughts fondly reverted to his early home--his farm, he called it--which contained 11 acres on the southwest side of Beacon Hill, now bounded by Charles, Beacon, Walnut, and Mt. Vernon streets, Louisburg Square and Pinckney street.