The 19th Century Allure of Roman Ruins

This blog post is one of a two-part series on collections at the Gibson House Museum from Italy.

In 1898, after a year of study at MIT for architecture, Charlie Gibson took an extended trip to Europe. It was common for wealthy American men to make such a trip—to cap off their education and before settling down to work and family—known in nineteenth-century parlance as a Grand Tour. The Grand Tour could include a variety of European destinations (some even traveled as far as Turkey), but the essential stops were London, Paris, Venice, and Rome. Travel to Rome, in particular, was seen as a chance to complete a classical education, specifically through study of the architecture and history of ancient Rome.

Traveling to Rome was difficult in the nineteenth century. A robust tourist industry had developed by the eighteenth century, and yet transportation, lodging, and access to reliable guides remained sketchy. Some Italian architects and artists made a living serving Grand Tourists. Giovanni Batista Piranesi was one. Starting as early as 1740, Piranesi worked in Rome producing views of the ancient Roman ruins. For many, Piranesi’s depictions of Rome were the way they imagined and understood the city.

Veduta dell'Anfiteatro Flavio, c. 1771
Giovanni Batista Piranesi

On the Occasion of the 250th Anniversary of the Boston Massacre

On March 5, 1770, a riot broke out on King Street (now State Street) in front of the Custom House in Boston. Soldiers fired into the crowd and killed five civilians. This dramatic event came on the heels of weeks of upset between colonists and British soldiers occupying the town. Its reverberations would be felt all the way through the American Revolution.

Red Study at the Gibson House Museum.

A copy of the famous print of the Boston Massacre, as the event would come to be known, hangs in the red study at the Gibson House. You might know the one I’m talking about. It shows a line of soldiers, in red coats with muskets, firing into a crowd. Three men in the foreground are seen shot and dying on the street. (This particular copy does not include Crispus Attucks, an African-American man born into slavery, and a well-known victim of the Massacre.) Well-dressed colonists look on in horror.

Paul Revere produced this illustration just three weeks after the event, titling it “The Bloody Massacre Perpetrated in King Street, Boston.” (He appears to have copied the image from the work of fellow printer, Henry Pelham, whose similar depiction was published around the same time.) The print became a famous, and important, piece of propaganda. It did much to inflame colonial sentiments against the British, even as it depicted an inaccurate portrayal of the actual event.

Why is there a copy at the Gibson House? This particular print was produced for the 1876 Centennial (purportedly on original plates from the archives of the Massachusetts Historical Society). It was first owned by Charlie Gibson’s uncle, Dr. John Collins Warren; Warren gave it to Charlie in 1904.