The American Revolution Illuminated

The American Revolution Illuminated Liam Riordan (bio) Eric Hinderaker. Boston's Massacre. cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2017. x + 358 pp. Maps, illustrations, appendix, notes, and index. $29.95. Jane Kamensky. A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2016. 526 pp. Illustrations, color plates, note on sources, notes, and index. $35.00. What a pleasure to review these two splendid books by accomplished mid-career historians. Carefully researched, broadly contextualized, thoughtfully conceptualized, and gracefully composed, both can be read with real profit by specialists, those with broad teaching interests in the British Atlantic world, and the educated general public. Each examines a famous subject, the shootings in King Street on March 5, 1770, lastingly known as the "Boston Massacre," and the life and career of John Singleton Copley (1738–1815), among the foremost painters of his day. Both subjects merit the full reconsideration received here, and each book demonstrates how much we can learn from familiar topics with expert guides. These event-based and biographically framed works advance a fundamental shared goal, one that is at the heart of much of the best recent work on the American Revolution: to understand its fullest meaning and significance, we still must labor to escape the powerful hold that a patriot perspective and that U.S. national categorization exerts over our historical imagination of the Revolutionary Era.1 Both authors advance our trans-national interpretive moment by challenging the dominant U.S. view of their subjects. Hinderaker must work around the seemingly fixed term of patriot propaganda that identifies his event as a massacre. Even though it may be "the most densely described incident in early American history" with over 200 surviving eyewitness accounts, what actually occurred that night "remains an irreducible mystery" filled with "radical uncertainty" that belies its static place in American popular memory (pp. 1, 219). For Hinderaker, the event is better understood as a "touchstone of American identity" propelled by the clash between legitimate authority and legitimate popular protest, a collision that should prohibit simple resolution in a stable [End Page 364] and lasting consensus (p. 283). Kamensky adroitly opens her book noting that Copley's famed portrait of Paul Revere (1768) still "forms the center panel of an American altarpiece" in the new Americas wing of Boston's Museum of Fine Art, where it is part of the "patriotic pantheon" painted by the great American artist Copley (pp. 1, 2). She closes with the presentation of his portrait of Mrs. Thomas Gage (Margaret Kemble) in San Diego's Timken Museum of Art, where it was celebrated in the 2012 exhibit, "Behold America! Art of the United States," yet the New Jersey-born Kemble was a British general's wife, her parents were loyalists, and, like Copley, she was "a longtime Londoner and lifetime Briton" (p. 401). A Revolution in Color triangulates among John Singleton Copley's family life, his paintings and the essential role of art patronage, and the decisive rupture of the Revolution. The poor Boston-born boy was ambitious, self-taught, and enjoyed enormous acclaim in the late 1770s and early 1780s, yet in spite of his surviving children's material success, he ended his career in debt and with a tattered reputation. Copley's permanent departure from the colonies in June 1774 is a clear turning point in his life, his art, and his politics. Kamensky's revealing assessment of over 500 family letters helps readers to see how these realms interconnected richly. She is least concerned with Revolutionary political allegiances, typically portrayed as a morality tale of black and white. Instead, the real world of rich color in life and art, as the book's clever title conveys, is her main quarry. The climax of the book comes at the end of chapter eight, with Copley's first towering success with Watson and the Shark (1778), and then in her treatment of two more masterworks in chapter nine: The Death of the Earl of Chatham (1779–1781) and The Death of Major Peirson (1782–84). Copley painted all three in London, and Kamensky's explication of the trio is a bravura performance all...