Eight angels on the walls of Boston’s historic Old North Church in 1730 have re-emerged after having been painted over in 1912. The cherubs painted against a teal background designed to look like trompe l’oeil stone reliefs. A garland of fruit hangs down between pairs of them. There are 20 angels in total, all of which will be revealed once the scaffolding is fully removed.
The seven layers of white paint were applied during a renovation that sought to give the interior of the church a Puritan style which the parish authorities mistakenly thought was what it must have looked like originally. But the Old North Church was not a Puritan congregation; it was Anglican, and its design was inspired by Christopher Wren’s London churches. The walls and wood were originally painted in a variety of rich colors.
“For much of the church’s history, people who were coming here to the church would have seen those angels, would have seen the colorful interior,” said Emily Spence, the associate director of education at Old North Illuminated, which operates the church as a historic site.
“The color scheme was an important part of the identity of the people who worshiped here as members of the congregation of a Church of England church,” she said, adding the interiors would have set the church apart from Puritans who dominated Boston at the time.
The Old North Church is the oldest church building in Boston. Construction began in 1723, with its brick tower and wooden steeple 191 feet high completed in 1740. That steeple would make the church famous as the place where sexton Robert Newman hung two lanterns on April 18, 1775, to warn the Massachusetts minutemen at Lexington that the British Army was approaching on the Charles River. The lanterns were a code devised by Paul Revere and while the legend that later arose in which he hung up the lanterns himself and rode alone through the night yelling “the British are coming!” is fictional, he (and several others) did indeed ride out that night to warn the militia. This was also his father’s parish church, and therefore his in his youth. When he was 15, he was one of the charge ringers who rang the church’s bells, which were themselves historic as the first peal of eight to be brought to America. (They were cast in Gloucester, England, in 1745.)
Restoration of the church began six months ago in anticipation of the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s midnight ride next year. Church records contain a contract for one John Gibbs, a member of the congregation, to paint the angels in 1730, so restorers knew they had once been there. An earlier paint study that there were still some paintings under the white layers, but they did not know what condition they were in.
Corrine Long, a painting conservator who works with [murals conservator Gianfranco] Pocobene, said one of the challenges was removing seven layers of paint without damaging the angels. The team first applied a solvent gel to soften the layers of paint and then manually removed it with a plastic scraper. After that, they cleaned the angels with cotton swabs before retouching to remove any signs of damage.
Once Pocobene and Long started removing the paint, they knew they’d uncovered something special.
“They all have their own character — they’re not copies,” Pocobene, who has his own studio in Lawrence, Massachusetts, said. “The artist John Gibbs painted them individually and they’re all in different poses, which gives them a really wonderful rhythmic kind of pattern across the surface of the church.”
* This article was originally published here
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