Thursday, 4:30 PM
Officials decline to share "Spirit of '76"
By Brian MacQuarrie, Globe Staff
MARBLEHEAD -- The iconic American painting hangs in patriotic splendor in the selectmen’s room inside historic Abbot Hall. The image is also slapped across coffee mugs, T-shirts, and chintzy bric-a-brac for sale on dozens of Internet sites.
But a reproduction of "Spirit of '76," perhaps the most famous painting on the Revolutionary War, won’t be available to the director of the Marblehead Museum and Historical Society for use in her book on local myths and legends. That’s because the Board of Selectmen has voted twice recently that Pamela Peterson cannot reproduce the stirring sight of two drummers and a fifer because the book is for profit.
If such a standard seems almost religiously protective, that’s because ‘"Spirit of '76" is revered in this North Shore town where history cloaks 300-year-old buildings like the ocean mist.
The town owns the painting, and the selectmen have been stingy in approving the image for outside use, except by nonprofit institutions and for education. From one board to the next, year after year, the selectmen have become the arbiters of its official distribution.
But according to a copyright specialist, the town appears to be on shaky legal ground.
