I have a piece in the Summer 2026 issue of Art in America, buy it wherever print magazines are sold! I’d say I’m psyched, but it was lowkey depressing as hell. Though it’s in the reviews section, it’s more a preview, of what US museums are showing for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, at a moment when the country’s facing an ongoing fascist existential attack. tl;dr, museums are not going to save us.
But one museum is doing the most, and it’s honestly not who I’d have expected. The NY Historical has had Johannes Adam Simon Oertel’s 1852-53 painting of New Yorkers pulling down the gilded lead statue of King George III after a public reading of the Declaration of Independence on July 9, 1776, since 1925. And the online text goes deep on the symbolism of the Native American family turned away on the left, and the Black figure on the ground at the center, about to get crushed. But they don’t say why Oertel painted this when he did.
What the Historical also has, though, are pieces of the statue itself.
In 1874, Cornelius Van Vorst VI donated the marble pedestal from George III’s statue, which had been used as the front step of his father’s mansion in what’s now Jersey City since 1804. That date coincides with the creation of the development of the New Jersey waterfront, where Van Vorsts had settled in the 1600s, and which had been occupied by the British until the end of the war in 1783. Which coincides with the slab’s previous use as a tombstone for a British officer, Major John Smith.
Scraps of the gilded lead statue was supposed to be hauled off to Connecticut and melted into bullets for the revolution. But more than a couple of royalists apparently buried fragments for safekeeping, and they’ve been turning up in peoples’ yards ever since.
The Historical acquired four pieces, including a large section of King George’s saddle and the horse’s tail, in 1878:
In 1999, the great niece of Alwine Wlodeck returned a 1/2 x 7/8 x 1/2 inch fragment of a fragment, which “fell off” the saddle during a visit to the Historical Society in the 1890s, and which Ms. Wlodeck and her family had kept for a hundred years.
The last piece to turn up, an unreconizable, tooth-shaped chunk, was given to the Historical in 2001.
Like the week after I filed the story, NY Historical had an instagram reel of an exhibit where kids were pulling on ropes to topple a virtual statue of King George. At this point I expect the Historical’s education department will set up a bullet casting workshop and donate at least 6 of their 7 statue fragments to help finish the No Kings job.
[July 2026 update]
As the July 9th anniversary of the toppling approached, art sleuth and historian Erin L. Thompson posted about a different fragment of the statue, a hand, which appeared at auction in 2019. It had been unearthed in 1991 in a yard of a house in Wilton, CT known to have belonged to a Tory loyalist. According to Skinner, loyalists ransacked the cart carrying the statue fragments during its nighttime stopover en route to Litchfield. The arm sold for $207,000.