The Battle of Bunker's Hill (June 17, 1775)

The soldier highlighted as a martyr here is Joseph Warren, Boston’s leading physician and a former president of the Massachusetts’ Provincial Congress. He died on the heights above Charlestown in the first major battle of the American Revolution, as American troops repulsed two British attacks before their ammunition ran low and their lines were broken. The artist Trumbull served in the colonial army and watched the losing battle through field glasses from nearby Roxbury. After independence was secured, Trumbell studied painting in London under Benjamin West and immortalized the present scene in a 1786 painting (Yale University Art Gallery). We see the battle’s turning point as British soldiers breach the hill. Following the dictates of history painting, Trumbull chose to elevate American heroism and British generosity toward a fallen opponent, showing the British Major John Small preventing a grenadier from bayonetting the fallen Warren. At right, the American Lieutenant Thomas Grosvenor and his Black servant respond with admiration. Trumbull finished the related painting in London eleven years after the event, and it then took the German engraver Müller twelve more to complete this print, also published in London. Such large, finely executed engravings could not yet be made in the fledgling United States, and played a key role in helping to popularize Trumbull’s heroic conception.