AFA Autumn 2021

Autumn 72 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com Perspective View of Boston Harbor, Christian Remick, 1768. Watercolor with pen and ink on laid paper. 135⁄16 × 64⅝ inches. Gift of Frederic Kidder, 1863 (R0442). Taken from the end of Long Wharf, this rare view of Boston Harbor depicts the landing of British troops in 1768, a crucial moment in the path leading to the American Revolution. To quell the Bostonians’ protests against the Townshend Acts, the Stamp Act, and other impositions by the Crown and Parliament, the British dispatched two regiments from Halifax, Nova Scotia, in October 1768. This perspective view by artist Christian Remick captures this unwelcome intrusion by the British; the irritating presence of the redcoats was one factor ultimately leading to the Boston Massacre of 1770 and subsequent events. Little is known of Remick’s work. Born into an old Cape Cod family, and presumably an auto-didact, his day job was that of a sailor and mariner. He valiantly tried to make a career as an artist, however, and he advertised in the Massachusetts Gazette in 1769 that he “performs all sorts of Drawing in Water Colours” and also would color pictures and draw coats of arms (some of which survive). He noted that he had on exhibition versions of this watercolor and other examples of his work in the Golden Ball and Bunch of Grapes taverns, and also at Thomas Bradford’s house in the North End. Remick collaborated at least several times with Paul Revere. It is generally thought that Remick drew the image engraved by Revere for his own view of The Landing of the Troops in 1769; Remick hand-colored and signed at least one example. He also used watercolor and gold pigment to hand color versions of Revere’s print of The Bloody Massacre of 1770 ; an example, signed “Cold. by Christn. Remick” at lower right, is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Remick’s other notable accomplishment, a drawing of Boston Common featuring the Hancock Mansion, is in the collection of Historic New England. View of West Point and Its Environs, Pierre Charles L’Enfant, 1782. Pencil, pen, and ink on paper. 15½ × 55 in. Gift of Rear Admiral Henry Knox Thatcher, 1873 (R0411). In 1802, the United States Military Academy at West Point was founded under a directive of President Thomas Jefferson. Some twenty years earlier, General Henry Knox (1750–1806), long an advocate of a military training school, was in command of Continental Army troops in the area and was captivated by the location on an S-curve in the Hudson River. He commissioned this important panoramic view from Pierre Charles L’Enfant, his engineer, to record the topography and the scope of General Washington’s 10,000-man-strong encampment. West Point, located in the town of Highlands, New York, was identified by Washington as the most important strategic position in the colonies during the American Revolution, and is the oldest continuously occupied military post in the country. The impressive encampment depicted in L’Enfant’s sketch was a show of order and a demonstration of force by Washington’s Army at a time when the Revolution was still in doubt, even though the decisive battle at Yorktown had occurred the year before. The faint pencil inscription on this drawing is said to have been “in the autograph” of Henry Knox, grandfather of the donor.