This French print depicts an event that occurred on the eve of the Revolutionary War at Bowling Green, way downtown at the end of Broadway.
After George Washington had the Declaration of Independence read, citizens and soldiers defiantly tore apart a statue of King George that had been erected there by colonists seven years earlier.
That actually happened, true. But so much of this print seem totally off because—in absence of any visual description or knowledge of what New York looked like back then—the print maker invented so many of the details.
“The statue of King George was in fact an equestrian piece, not a standing figure; the oddly turbaned, half-naked ‘Indian’ rioters resembled no known American patriots,” explains the caption to the print in New York: An Illustrated History, by Ric Burns and James Sanders.
“And the surrounding buildings were those of a grand European capital rather than the modest brick dwellings of colonial New York.”
Tags: Bowling Green, Colonial New York City, George Washington in NYC, New York: An illustrated History, Old prints of New York City, Revolutionary War New York City, Ric Burns New York documentary
April 13, 2015 at 4:17 pm |
[…] Tearing down the sculpture of King George in Bowling Green (though many details of the scene are off) […]
February 22, 2021 at 3:29 am |
[…] Georgian-style, two-story stunner sat at the foot of Broadway with New York Harbor behind it and Bowling Green in front. Begun in either 1789 or 1790 on the former site of Fort Amsterdam, the elevated mansion […]