By the late 1760s, England had incurred large debts from the French and Indian War (1756–63) and the subsequent need to station and maintain troops in the expanded Empire. One of Parliament’s solutions to this fiscal problem was the adoption in 1767 of the Townshend Acts, which levied taxes on exported glass, painter’s colors, lead, paper, and tea. In the American colonies these new taxes were extremely unpopular, and in 1768 the Massachusetts House of Representatives sent a circular letter of protest to the other colonies. When the House did not respond to Parliament’s demand to rescind the letter, British troops were sent to occupy Boston. The presence of these troops was bitterly resented by Bostonians, and on March 5, 1770, a mob provoked one of the soldiers. A skirmish ensued, and five citizens were killed by British fire. Just twenty-three days later Paul Revere produced this propagandistic and historically inaccurate print, which became an instant symbol of British tyranny. Revere plagiarized the composition from a print by Henry Pelham, a young Boston engraver, who had shown his work to Revere. There are two states of the print. Although the incident occurred after ten o’clock, Revere’s first version shows the hands of the Old State House clock at 8:10. The mistake was corrected in the second state to show the hands at 10:20, as can be seen in the present example.

Related examples: While there is only one known example of the first state (Middendorf 1967, p. 88, no. 60a), there are a number of surviving impressions of the second state. Three are at the MFA, Boston, one of which is signed by the colorist Christian Remick (Fairbanks et al. 1975, p. 113, no. 165); another is in the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Stone (Kennedy and Sack 1977, no. 90). The Bayou Bend example is unsigned, but its coloring compares very closely with the signed Boston version. For other examples, see Shadwell 1969, p. 28.

Book excerpt: David B. Warren, Michael K. Brown, Elizabeth Ann Coleman, and Emily Ballew Neff. American Decorative Arts and Paintings in the Bayou Bend Collection. Houston: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998.