Paul Revere

Paul Revere was 78 when he sat for Gilbert Stuart in 1813, and the order came from his son, Joseph Warren Revere, who wanted portraits of both his parents. By then Revere had long since stopped working as a silversmith. In 1801 he had bought an old gunpowder mill at Canton, south of Boston, and turned it into a works for rolling sheet copper, the metal that sheathed the hull of the frigate Constitution and covered the dome of the Massachusetts State House. Copley had painted him 45 years earlier at his workbench in shirtsleeves. Stuart, the most fashionable portrait painter in Boston, shows a man of property, white-haired, in a dark coat, painted on a wooden panel. Revere's wife Rachel sat for the companion portrait only weeks before she died, on 26 June 1813. Her picture stayed with his in their son's family for more than a century, and both are now in the museum.