Bunker Hill

begin.
    “My life must be militant to its close,” he wrote, and on that evening in June 1843, as he turned to walk back to the home he had inherited from his father, he was still spoiling for a fight.

Three views of Boston drawn in 1764, the year before the passage of the Stamp Act.

    Looking north from Boston’s Beacon Hill across the many ropewalks at Barton’s Point, with Charlestown beyond.

Looking south from Beacon Hill across Boston Common and the Back Bay, with Boston Neck curving to the right toward Roxbury.

Looking north from Long Wharf toward Boston’s North End.

The cross-eyed Josiah Quincy Jr., the most articulate lawyer in Boston and a passionate patriot, died of tuberculosis before he could report on the results of a diplomatic mission to London during the winter of 1775. This portrait was painted posthumously by Gilbert Stuart.
    (Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

Some of the forceful intensity that made Samuel Adams such an effective revolutionary leader is evident in this portrait painted by John Singleton Copley soon after the Boston Massacre.
    (Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

Sometimes referred to as “King Hancock,” John Hancock had the highest public profile among Boston’s patriots. This portrait was painted by Copley circa 1770–1772.

The Reverend Samuel Cooper led Boston’s most affluent congregation at the Brattle Street Meeting; he was also one of Boston’s leading patriots and maintained a correspondence with Benjamin Franklin in London.

King George III in 1771, four years before the eruption of violence at Lexington and Concord.

In 1771, John Singleton Copley traveled to New York, where he painted this portrait of General Thomas Gage, future royal governor of Massachusetts.

Margaret Gage’s much-commented-on beauty is evident in this portrait by Copley, which the artist considered one of his finest.

Joseph Warren, dressed in the traditional black of a physician, leans on an anatomical drawing in this portrait painted by Copley in the mid-1760s.
    (Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

A Lady in a Blue Dress
was painted by Copley in the early 1760s and may depict Joseph Warren’s future fiancée, Mercy Scollay.

The silversmith Paul Revere, painted by Copley in 1768, the year British troops first arrived at Long Wharf.
    (Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

The Green Dragon Tavern in Boston’s North End was the home of the St. Andrew’s Masonic Lodge and an important center of patriot activities in the 1770s.

Captain John Montresor was the highly skilled British engineer who oversaw the construction of the many defensive works around Boston and on the Charlestown peninsula during the siege.

The fighting at Lexington Green, the first in a series of four engravings issued by Amos Doolittle in 1775 based on interviews with eyewitnesses and careful study of the terrain.

The newly arrived British officers Colonel Francis Smith and Major John Pitcairn stand on the hill overlooking the town of Concord, studying the militiamen on Punkatasset Hill to the north.

Militiamen and British regulars collide at the North Bridge in Concord.

The flag that militiamen from the town of Bedford reputedly flew during the fighting at the North Bridge.

The fighting along the road from Lexington to Charlestown.

Some claimed that if Captain Timothy Pickering of Salem had shown the proper spirit, he and his militia company might have cut off General Percy’s British regulars before they reached Charlestown.

Artemas Ward of Shrewsbury was forty-seven and suffering from an attack of kidney stones when he took command of the provincial forces after the fighting at Lexington and Concord.

John Trumbull’s
Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill.
When Abigail Adams first saw this painting in 1786, she claimed that “my blood shivered.”
    (Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

Abigail Adams, circa 1766, ten years before she witnessed the reading of the Declaration of Independence at the State House in Boston.

Charles Willson Peale painted this portrait of George Washington around 1780. According to one observer, “There is not a king in Europe that would not look like a valet de chamber by his side.”

Despite having been raised as a Quaker, the Rhode Islander Nathanael Greene quickly distinguished himself as one of Washington’s most promising young generals. This portrait was painted by Charles Willson Peale in 1783.

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