Visitors to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts know the work of John Singleton Copley through his portraits of some of the nation’s most storied revolutionaries, including John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and Paul Revere. But we see Copley as a chronicler of the American Revolution because “that’s the way we’ve been taught to see him,’’ said historian Jane Kamensky. “We press those portraits into the service of a story about who we are as a people.’’

In reality, she added, Copley painted dozens of eminent Bostonians years before there was “a whisper of independence,’’ during a time in which most people living in Boston considered themselves to be British subjects, as Copley himself did throughout his life. “That’s a wonderful irony,’’ Kamensky said. “His life in some ways is at war with the way his art is most often displayed in the United States.’’

“A Revolution in Color’’ is Kamensky’s attempt not only to tell Copley’s life story but to re-examine widely held ideas about Boston in his era. Born in 1738, the painter knew his hometown as “a seaport in Britain’s empire . . . his Boston was British.’’ Copley left for London just as the colonies began seriously to promote their independence (an idea about which he was ambivalent), and remained there until his death at 77.

Kamensky had planned a book about many painters, but she was drawn to Copley, she said, “because I liked his written voice so much.’’ An artist who struggled with self-doubt, financial reversals, and a difficult stutter, Copley was “delightfully real in an age when a lot of our popular history permits only heroes,’’ said Kamensky.

Kamensky will read 7 p.m. Wednesday at Harvard Book Store.

Kate Tuttle, a writer and editor, can be reached at kate.tuttle@gmail.com.