Lot 156D email save

(ARNOLD, Benedict). A Representation of the Figur

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[Philadelphia: Francis Bailey, November 1780]. Woodcut engraved caricature (200 x 305 mm). Text below in three columns, comprising a Description of the Figures and poem. Condition: separations at folds repaired, several large tears repaired, lower left margin supplied. two-faced benedict arnold burned in effigy in the streets of philadelphia. "News of Arnold's treason reached Philadelphia on 27 September 1780 ... No less an artist than Charles Wilson Peale created the effigy. Dressed in a red coat, and with two faces, it sat in a cart before a large black figure of the Devil shaking a purse of money in its ear ... Gentlemen on horseback were followed by Continental officers and a guard of the city infantry and, just before the cart, by a fife-and-drum corps playing the Rogue's March" (Snyder). This wood-cut engraving recreated that scene in the weeks which followed. Published as the frontispiece to Bailey and David Rittenhouse's Continental Alamanc for 1781, it "is a very attractive piece of work, excellent in design and skilfully cut, and it conveys a lively sense of the situation" (Murrell). Copies of the original work are very rare. Indeed, we could only locate copies at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (as illustrated by Snyder) and at the American Antiquarian Society. Murrell, pp. 29-32; Snyder, COI 103.

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