Lyndhurst Estate Sale. Sales cat., London, March 5, 1864, no. 69. ["Head of a Negro/ Very fine - introduced into the picture of "A boy saved from a Shark"; painting sold for eleven pounds, eleven shillings.]
Perkins, Augustus Thorndike. Sketch of the Life and a List of Some of the Works of John Singleton Copley Boston, 1873, p. 132.
Sales cat., Christie's. London, May 23-24, 1928, no. 217.
Bayley, Frank W. Five Colonial Artists of New England. Boston, 1929, p. 184.
"Recent Additions to America's Public Collections." Art Digest 26 (July 1952): p. 7.
Richardson, Edgar P. “Head of a Negro by John Singleton Copley.” The Art Quarterly 15, 4 (Winter 1952): p. 351.
_____________. “Head of a Negro by John Singleton Copley.” Bulletin of the DIA 32, 3 (1952-1953): pp. 68-70 (ill.).
Prown, Jules D. John S. Copley 1774-1815. Cambridge, MA, 1966, pp. 274, 301, 322 (fig. 381).
Plate, Robert. John Singleton Copley. New York, 1969, pp. 90-91 (ill.).
Frankenstein, Alfred. The World of Copley 1738-1815. New York, 1970, p. 149.
John Singleton Copley 1738-1815. Exh. cat., National Portrait Gallery. Washington, D.C., 1965, p. 95, no. 69.
McElroy, Guy C. Facing History: The Black Image in American Art, 1710-1940. Washington, D.C., 1990, pp. 4-5.
Shaw, Nancy Rivard, et al. American Paintings in the Detroit Institute of Arts, Volume I. New York, 1991, pp. 62-64 (ill.).
American Beauty: Painting and Sculpture from the Detroit Institute of Arts, 1770-1920. Exh. cat., Detroit Institute of Arts. Detroit, 2002, p. 12, no. 5.
Entangled Pasts: 1768-Now. Exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts. London, 2024. p. 62.