Beschreibung:

REVERE, Paul (1734-1818) engraver. The Bloody Massacre perpetrated in King Street, Boston, on March 5th 1770, by a Party of the 29th Regt . Boston: Engrav'd Printed & Sold by Paul Revere March 1770.
REVERE, Paul (1734-1818) engraver. The Bloody Massacre perpetrated in King Street, Boston, on March 5th 1770, by a Party of the 29th Regt . Boston: Engrav'd Printed & Sold by Paul Revere March 1770. Engraving with hand-coloring. 11 x 10 in. Browning, marginal losses, especially along left-hand margin, affecting a few words in the verse, several clean tears mended from the verso, top right-hand hand area abraded Brigham 14; Stokes & Haskell, 1770-C-10. Printed on laid paper with watermark Strasburg Lily with pendant initials LVG (cf Heawood 1808, ascribed by some, according to Brigham, to Lobertus van Gerrevink of Holland). Engraved caption at top, at bottom 18 lines of verse (“Unhappy Boston! See thy Sons deplore...”) and a detailed list of the American casualties: “Saml Gray, Saml Maverick, James Caldwell, Crispus Attucks, and Patrick Carr," plus "Six wounded; two of them (Christr Monk & John Clark Mortally." This variant with a small clock tower reading 10:20 (Brigham notes a later variant, altered to 8:00). REVERE'S INFLAMMATORY "BLOODY MASSACRE" PRINT "Few prints have influenced history as much as Paul Revere's engraving of the Boston Massacre of 1770...Revere’s version of British soldiers firing on and killing unarmed citizenry had immediate emotional impact on the public and was an initial incendiary spark that ignited the events leading to the American Revolution” (D. Roylance, American Graphic Arts, Princeton, 1990, p.48). Revere immediately recognized the propaganda value of the incident, and "saw the opportunity of furthering the patriot cause by circulating so significant a print" (Clarence S. Brigham, Paul Revere's Engravings , New York, 1969, p.52-53). Revere's powerful depiction was based on a sketch by Henry Pelham; he and another engraver, Jonathan Mullikan, produced competing prints. Revere's engraving was advertised for sale in the March 26th editions of the Boston Evening Post and the Boston Gazette: "a Print, containing a Representation of the late horrid Massacre in King-street." Two days later Revere noted in his Day Book that he paid the printers Edes & Gill to produce 200 impressions. Pelham's depiction was advertised for sale in the same publications a week later. The sanguinary events of March 5--in which five Bostonians died by British musket-fire--took on great symbolic significance due to the highly charged tenor of public affairs between England and its colonies, Massachusetts in particularly. Paul Revere's incendiary "Bloody Butchery" powerfully fanned the embers of opposition to British rule. The event, commemorated annually in following years, was a significant factor in radically altering Americans' attitude toward the King's armies quartered among them. There can be little doubt that Revere's dramatic depiction remained vivid in the minds of the patriots who composed the Declaration of Independence; enumerating America's grievances against the Crown, it indicted the King "for quartering large bodies of armed troops among us...."