Date: Tuesday, March 3, 2026
Time: 6:30 pm.
Location: Lecture will be held virtually on ZOOM
Cost: Free. To make Litchfield's 250th Commemorationaccessible to as many people as possible, all lectures are offered free ofcharge. Donation's welcome and encouraged. Donate here.
Registration Required
On the night of July 9, 1776, a crowd emboldened by a public reading of the Declaration of Independence pulled a huge equestrian statue of George III from its pedestal at Bowling Green in lower Manhattan. A British officer conveyed the decapitated head to London, intending to demonstrate the patriots’ defiance, and soldiers transported the remaining fragments to Litchfield, where the statue was melted down and recast as ammunition for Continental soldiers. En route, loyalists in Wilton absconded with pieces of the statue, concealing them in fields, swamps, and cellars. This talk revisits this dramatic episode of the American Revolution and explores its lesser-known afterlife in the twentieth century, when historical re-enactors in Litchfield, Wilton, and New York recreated the lost statue—only to destroy it all over again.
Wendy Bellion is Professor of Art History and Sewell C. Biggs Chair in American Art at the University of Delaware. Her scholarship focuses on the art and material culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century Atlantic World and the early modern Americas. Her most recent publications include the books Iconoclasm in New York: Revolution to Reenactment (2019); Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion and Visual Perception in Early National America (2011), which was awarded the Smithsonian Institution’s Eldredge Prize; and the co-edited volume Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century: Art, Mobility, and Change (2023). Her current research explores the women of the Peale family and the visual culture of theater in post-revolutionary Philadelphia.
The lecture will be presented over Zoom and spots are limited. The event is free, and donations are appreciated.
