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Paul Revere the Shephard Fairey of his day?
By adamg on Sat, 03/07/2009 - 10:03am
J.L. Bell lays out the evidence that Revere's famous engraving of the Boston Massacre was actually based on the work of another artist.
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Comments
They both copied it from a British rag
as I remember the both of them lifted it from a London magazine or newspaper. That's where Revere got all his cartoons, anyway, and he freely admitted he couldn't draw his way out of a barrel unless he had something to copy.
Maybe the squirrel kid saw the same newspaper.
not that one
Revere copied a lot of his other political cartoons from British models, which was the only way to reproduce them in the colonies, but the Massacre print was a Henry Pelham original.
Pelham's drawing shows the Town House (now called the Old State House) in the background, plus the spire of the First Meeting-House. Those and the surrounding streetscape had to look accurate for Bostonians. Pelham couldn't just pull out a random scene from London. There was no useful scene of Boston from London because print customers there didn't care what a distant colonial outpost looked like.
The Squirrel Kid
You're absolutely right, and my bad.