The Engravings of Paul Revere

Although Paul Revere is best known for his famous midnight ride, he had talents beyond his ability to handle a horse. After an apprenticeship in metalworking under his father, Revere began a career as a silversmith and part-time dentist. His silver shop was known for its fine cutlery, fluted tea pots, and other ornamented serving-ware. As a dentist, he made artificial teeth out of ivory or animal teeth and fixed them with metal wiring.

With his skill in detailed metalwork, Revere also engraved images on plates of copper for printed illustrations. (For a detailed description of the process of engraving and printing copperplate illustrations, see our earlier blog post, “Printing Illustrations“). Revere had a small handpress in his silver shop, and many of his engravings were printed in prominent Boston publications. However, Revere was more craftsman than artist, and his engravings were almost always copied or adapted from other artists’ drawings. This was not unusual for engraving sculptors in this era.

Revere was a member of the Sons of Liberty in Boston, and most of his engravings were revolutionary in their content, including political cartoons and other provocative images. An examination of Paul Revere’s engravings held in the Library’s Rare Book and Special Collections Division reveals a compelling history of the events leading up to his legendary ride to warn his fellow Americans that British forces were on the march toward Lexington and Concord. 

Revere’s iconic engraving of the Boston Massacre, produced within three weeks of the killing of five Americans on March 5^th, 1770, depicts an orderly line of British soldiers firing into a crowd of civilians. While the event was likely more chaotic than Revere’s engraving depicts, this image was shared widely and served as effective propaganda in garnering broad sympathy across the American colonies in support of Bostonians living under British military occupation. Revere’s engraving was distributed as a larger standalone broadside and also appeared in this smaller format as a frontispiece illustration to the book A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston.