Glimpsing Another Copy of Revere’s Massacre

Ben Edwards alerted me to this report from Antiques and the Arts about sales at the Doyle auction house early this month that set records for works by Paul Revere.

The items on sale all appear to have come from the collection of Monroe F. Dreher, an mid-20th-century advertising executive, and his wife Elizabeth. The “period rooms” in their Connecticut home was featured in The Magazine Antiques in 1954. Dreher was known for recording the provenances of the pieces he bought, many descended within families, and his collection hasn’t been on display or on the market for decades.

Among the silverware sold was a “Liverpool” pitcher by Revere from 1805 that sold for $94,500, or about three times the estimated price, and a cream jug made by Paul Revere, Jr., in 1783 for $22,680.

But the major sale was a copy of Revere’s “Bloody Massacre” engraving for $429,000, a new record for that print.

This is yet another example of the print with the face of one victim, upside-down and half-hidden within the crowd in the lower left corner, colored a little darker than the faces of other people around him.

This coloring can be only subtly different, enough to make one wonder whether it’s just an artifact of time, or that face can be a dark brown, as in the Philadelphia public library’s copy. This example is somewhere in between.

That pattern of an extra color wash, along with the dual chest wounds painted onto several copies, has convinced me that figure was always supposed to represent Crispus Attucks. Revere wasn’t able to depict him as a person of color in the engraving alone, but the coloring rendered him an individual.