Submitted by Correct-Cricket3355 t3_z8u22p in nyc
Correct-Cricket3355 OP t1_iyf7drp wrote
Reply to comment by bobbyamillion in The Destruction of the Royal Statue in New York - July 9, 1776 by Correct-Cricket3355
Five days after the Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia, a pro-revolutionary group known as the New York Sons of Liberty tore down a statue of George III standing at Broadway and Bowling Green. This imaginative recreation of that event correctly shows enslaved and free Black men performing most of the labor, but dresses them in fanciful Turkish attire—a costume often worn by Black men in European art that refers to the legality of slavery in the Ottoman Empire. The Baroque architecture is more characteristic of a large European city from that era than Anglo-Dutch colonial New York, and the actual statue showed the king on horseback. Published in Paris, but based on a print issued slightly before in Augsburg and demonstrates broad European interest in the dramatic events taking place across the Atlantic. It was intended to be shown on a wall or screen using a "magic lantern", an optical device that projected the image by means of candles and mirrors, and often called a "Vue d'Optique.”
bobbyamillion t1_iyf7wg0 wrote
Oh, thank you!
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