Antiques.(Biography)

... there is properly no history; only biography.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "History," Essays, 1841

The full story of Paul Revere's Sons of Liberty Bowl is a truth borne out by Emerson's observation, a confluence of biographies that concluded when the bowl was acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1949. The final chapter might be said to have been written by Israel Sack, a Lithuanian immigrant cabinetmaker who fled religious persecution in Czarist Russia by way of England and arrived by steerage passage in Boston in 1903 to set up in business. As recounted by Sack's son Albert in the excerpts from his memoirs included in this issue. the other later players in this story included the wealthy New Yorker Marsden J. Perry Jr., a descendant of one of the Sons of Liberty who commissioned the bowl, as well as the notorious Boston mayor James Michael Curley.

But there were many others, and we are indebted to Jonathan L. Fairbanks for his documentation in "Paul Revere and 1768: His Portrait and the Liberty Bowl," which was published in New England Silver and Silversmithing. 1620-1815 (2001). The Sons of Liberty was a loose affiliation of colonial patriot groups organized during the Stamp Act resistance of 1765. The movement probably began in New York, where a group soon initiated correspondence with others in New England and then with patriots in the Carolinas, Virginia, and Georgia. With the repeal of the Stamp Act, the movement dissolved, but it was revived in response to the Townshend Acts, which many influential Americans saw as an abuse of Great Britain's constitutional relationship with the colonies, believing that Parliament had no right to impose any taxes on the colonists. In 1768 the Massachusetts legislature

issued a circular letter describing the measures it had taken against the Townshend Acts, which resulted in a series of nonimportation agreements that reduced colonial imports from Britain by half, and in response Governor Francis Bernard dissolved the legislature. Fairbanks found that in that same year John Singleton Copley painted his famous portrait of the silversmith-patriot Revere and Revere fashioned the Sons of Liberty ...