CUPID'S TOWER./ BUNKERS HILL or America's Head Dress

Date1776

Publisher Matthew Darly (ca. 1720 - 1780)

MediumBlack and white line engraving

DimensionsOH: 10 1/2" x OW: 17 3/4"; Plate (two on one sheet), H: 9 1/2" x W: 7".

Credit LineMuseum Purchase

Object number1960-56,A&B

DescriptionLower margin of left print reads: "CUPID'S TOWER./ Fair tresses Man's imperial race ensnare,/ And beauty draws us with a single hair./ Pub.d march 1. 1776 by MDarly 39 Strand."
Lower margin of print on the right reads: "BUNKERS HILL/ or America's Head Dress"

CUPID'S TOWER - The lower margin reads: "Fair tresses Man's imperial race ensnare,/ And beauty draws us with a single hair./ Pub.d March 1, 1776 by M. Darly 39 Strand"
A lady in profile facing to the left is shown with an enormous pyramid of hair done in the fashion of the day. On the broad summit of the pyramid lies a minature cupid fitting an arrow to his bow and about to aim in the direction in which the lady is looking. She wears the fashiopnable full dress of the period.

BUNKERS HILL - The lower margin reads: "BUNKERS HILL/ or America's Head Dress" A lady is shown in profile to the right with the enormous, grotesquely exaggerated coiffure of the mid-eighteenth century style. Her hands are in a muff. Her inverted pyramid of hair supports 3 quassi-circular redoubts surrounded by cannon on which troops are fighting. On each is a flag. These flags are large and out of proportion to the soldiers. There are also trains of artillery and a number of tents. All the men in the redoubts are dressed as British soldiers, but are firing point-blank at each other. The 3 flags are decorated respectively with an ape, 2 women holding darts of lightning, and a goose. The men pulling the lower cannons are dressed in a colonial type of attire. The lowest point of the hair has 3 ships in full sail.
Label TextAfter the battles of Lexington and Concord in April 1775, a makeshift army of New Englanders besieged the British held town of Boston. In June, the British, believing that the Americans would flee at the sight of their well-trained army, attacked the American fortifications on Breed's Hill across the Charles River from Boston. Although the British were victorious, their casualties numbered nearly fifty percent of their forces.

The engagement soon became known as the battle of Bunkers Hill. This print uses the elaborate hairstyles popular among the upper-class women in the eighteenth century as the stage for the military encounter. The woman's headress is so large that it can hold all of the needs of the campaign, including flags, cannons, ships, tents, soliders, and fortifications. Interestingly, the soliders firing at each other appear to be British, while the colonists are represented by the men dragging a pair of cannons below the fort.

This copy published in Joan D. Dolmetsch, "Rebellion and Reconciliation: Satirical Prints on the Revolution at Williamsburg" (Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1976), plate 37, p. 87.