Called in his day the “patriot-artist,” John Trumbull served in the Continental Army from 1775 to 1777. He then resigned his commission and in 1780 went to London to study painting with Benjamin West and traveled to Paris; in both capitals he was inspired by contemporary history paintings. Trumbull returned to the United States with a plan to immortalize the country’s struggle for independence with a series of compositions based on the critical events of the conflict, thus creating a new iconography for the new nation. He became known for his celebratory images of the Revolutionary War, ultimately completing eight different scenes in multiple versions. In 1817 Congress awarded Trumbull a commission for four large canvases to decorate the United States Capitol. Although The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill, 17 June 1775 was the first Revolutionary War subject that Trumbull completed, it was not ultimately chosen for the Capitol.

Joseph Warren [95.1366], perhaps today less well known than Paul Revere [30.781], John Hancock [L-R 30.76d], or Samuel Adams [L-R 30.76c], was one of the key players in the events leading up to the outbreak of war. A popular and innovative physician—among other things, he advocated inoculation and cleanliness in the treatment of his patients—Warren plunged into politics in the late 1760s as the writer of persuasive anti-Crown literature, an orator of eloquent speeches, and an underground leader of the growing revolutionary movement. He had accepted a commission as a major general on June 14, 1775, but it was still serving as a volunteer when he was killed three days later at the Battle of Bunker Hill. Warren’s heroism immediately captured the imagination of the American public. He was so idolized that in the decade following his death there were more towns and streets named after him than after George Washington.

Trumbull, who was in Boston with the Continental Army in 1775, was said to have observed the battle (although he was stationed in Roxbury, some distance away). He immortalized the events in dramatic fashion, elevating them with a heroic iconography that recalls religious art [2015.2163] and eschews many facts of the battle in favor of contemporary artistic preferences for nobility and spectacle. His composition, like his teacher West’s iconic Death of General Wolfe (1770, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa), refers to old master images of the Lamentation of Christ [22.77]. Warren collapses in the arms of a militiaman, while a British officer, Brigade Major John Small, prevents a grenadier from stabbing Warren with his bayonet. When Abigail Adams viewed Trumbull’s original sketch, she claimed her “blood shivered” at the sight, so vivid was the artist’s depiction of the scene.[1]



Many of the leading participants, both American and British, in the surrounding fray are identifiable, among them William Howe, Henry Clinton, Israel Putnam, and William Prescott (who allegedly gave the order to his American soldiers not to fire until “you see the whites of their eyes”). Most of the men at arms—including the vicious grenadier—were, as Trumbull later recalled, a “pictorial liberty.”[2] Similarly, the painter included only two of the more than 100 African American and Native American soldiers who fought in the battle. While the names of most of the white officers on both sides of the conflict were recorded, more recent scholarship has focused upon several other figures, particularly the Black man holding a musket at right. He has often been identified as either Salem Poor or Peter Salem, two of the African American soldiers (sometimes conflated with one another) who are known to have served that day. It seems more likely, however, that the figure represents Asaba, an enslaved man owned by Lieutenant Thomas Grosvenor, the officer in the plumed hat who stands before him with a sword. [3]



Trumbull painted several versions of the battle and also authorized a popular and profitable print after it; his scene became one of the best-known images of the war. The MFA’s canvas descended in the Warren family.





Notes

1. Abigail Adams to Mrs. John Shaw, March 4, 1786, in Letters of Mrs. Adams, the Wife of John Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Boston, 1840), 324.

2. Benjamin Silliman Note Book (1858), 65-68, typescript in Trumbull papers, Box 10, folder 128 (microfilm 7:78-81), Yale University, as quoted in Margot Lee Minardi, “The Inevitable Negro: Making Slavery History in Massachusetts,” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2007. See also Minardi, Making Slavery History: Abolitionism and the Politics of Memory in Massachusetts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

3. George Quintal, Jr., “Patriots of Color, ‘A Peculiar Beauty and Merit’: African Americans and Native Americans at Battle Road and Bunker Hill” (National Park Service report, Feb. 2002). See also Daniel C. Littlefield, “Revolutionary Citizens: 1776-1804,” in To Make Our World Anew: Volume One, A History of African Americans to 1880, Robin D.G. Kelley and Earl Lewis, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 98, 113-4.





This text was adapted from Elliot Bostwick Davis et al., American Painting [http://www.mfashop.com/9020398034.html], MFA Highlights (Boston: MFA Publications, 2003). Revised and updated by Erica E. Hirshler, June 2020.

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