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Johannes Adam Simon Oertel. Pulling Down the Statue of King George III, N.Y C. ca. 1859. Oil on canvas.

Artist Johannes A. S. Oertel, working in the mid-nineteenth century, provides an imagined depiction of the destruction of George III’s statue in Bowling Green, the first victim of New Yorkers’ reaction to hearing news of the Declaration of Independence. Oertel places women, children and Native Americans among what eyewitnesses recorded as a rowdy crowd of soldiers and civilians. No true image of the statue itself survives. However, contemporary descriptions inform us that the King was sculpted in Roman garb, not the eighteenth-century royal dress shown in the painting. More accurate is the view of the statue reconstructed by Charles M. Lefferts at right.