Samuel Adams

On 6 March 1770, the morning after British soldiers fired into a crowd on King Street and killed five men, Samuel Adams led a committee of the town meeting to face the acting governor, Thomas Hutchinson, and demanded that the troops leave Boston. Hutchinson gave way, and the regiments were moved out to Castle Island in the harbour. Adams always counted it the greatest moment of his life, and that confrontation is what Copley painted, about two years later. Adams points down at the charter that King William and Queen Mary had granted Massachusetts, its seal beside it, and in his other hand he grips a paper whose heading you can still read, the instructions of the Town of Boston. There is no ornament at all. A plain reddish-brown suit, a waistcoat with two buttons left undone, light falling only on his face and hands. By tradition the picture was ordered by John Hancock, the wealthy merchant who backed Adams's cause, and it hung in Hancock's house on Beacon Hill, where patriot meetings were held. Engravings soon carried the image further. In 1841 Adams's grandson sold it to the City of Boston.