Time Discovering Truth, sketch
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Object Label
At at time when many groups were laying claim to the colonial past, Frederick MacMonnies was commissioned by the Sons of the American Revolution to create a sculpture of the American patriot Nathan Hale for Manhattan's City Hall Park. They required that it represent "a well-built man of American type, dressed in a simple costume of the end of the last Century . . . at the moment immediately preceding his execution by the British."
MacMonnies researched the life of Hale, a young schoolteacher who infiltrated British camps in occupied Brooklyn and New York, and he was determined to produce a forceful memorial for an increasingly diverse urban audience: "I wanted to make something that would set the bootblacks and little clerks around there thinking something that would make them want to be somebody and find life worth living."
Caption
Mariano Salvador de Maella (Spanish, 1739–1819). Time Discovering Truth, sketch, 1765. Oil on canvas, 22 × 23 3/4 in. (55.9 × 60.3 cm) frame: 29 1/2 × 30 1/2 × 3 1/4 in. (74.9 × 77.5 × 8.3 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Francis Gottsberger in memory of his wife, Eliza, 06.86. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)
Gallery
Not on view
Collection
Gallery
Not on view
Collection
Title
Time Discovering Truth, sketch
Date
1765
Geography
Place made: Spain
Medium
Oil on canvas
Classification
Dimensions
22 × 23 3/4 in. (55.9 × 60.3 cm) frame: 29 1/2 × 30 1/2 × 3 1/4 in. (74.9 × 77.5 × 8.3 cm)
Credit Line
Gift of Francis Gottsberger in memory of his wife, Eliza
Accession Number
06.86
Rights
No known copyright restrictions
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