Some of those objects appear in a gallery of 17th-century Puritan domestic artifacts, which include German pottery, English silver and a local version of Old World furniture. And who knew that these pious pioneers painted their chairs and chests with zany patterns, the equivalent of plaids and polka dots, to warm up New England winters?

And there’s a gallery — a sheer delight — given over to embroidered samplers. Two of the dozens on view were made in England and inspired the production of imaginative spinoffs in Boston, a city that identified itself as British (some would say still does) until politics dictated otherwise.

That story of disruption is told on the next floor up, which opens with John Singleton Copley’s 1768 portrait of the Boston silversmith and midnight rider Paul Revere. Copley presents his subject, with ostentatious informality, as a working man in shirt-sleeves momentarily distracted from a job. The teapot he holds is unfinished, but his masterpiece is right there in the gallery: the famous “Sons of Liberty Bowl,” a homage in advance to a revolution to come.

Revere is positioned as a hero in the museum’s 18th- and early-19th-century galleries, as is George Washington, seen in Thomas Sully’s billboard-size “Passage of the Delaware.” But Copley is the star. His “Watson and the Shark,” a dramatization of a real-life “Jaws” encounter, takes center stage in a side gallery. He yearned to produce more of this kind of narrative painting and complained that all his fellow Bostonians wanted was portraiture. There was a reason for that. No early American painter surpassed him in that genre, and the museum has the best of his best.

High on that list is his likeness of the Boston merchant Nicholas Boylston, who sits, as bright as a penny, in a morning coat of aquamarine silk damask and a rakish turban, with one of his ships visible in the distance. Equally impressive is a likeness of Boylston’s not-young, unmarried sister Rebecca. By Boston standards she was over the hill, but Copley made her something of a dish in a low-cut, figure-accenting Jean Harlowesque gown.