Oil on canvas, (72 x 102 in). Signed on the right on the step: A.M. Willard, 1880

Union Club of Cleveland

The monumental history painting, Minutemen of the Revolution, also known as Minute Man of 76, was widely considered the best picture of Archibald Willard’s career. Painted in 1888, the work was described at length in a Cleveland Press article chronicling the painter's major artistic accomplishments shortly after his death.  One of Willard’s life sized patriotic pictures, the Minuteman of 76 is still in the possession of the family. It shows the patriot of the American Revolution answering the call of freedom. He has left his oxen standing in the field where he was plowing. His wife is handing him his powder horn, while his little boy stands by waiting to give him his musket. In the doorway of the house is the old grandfather with a musket. He wants to fight for freedom, too, but the little granddaughter is holding him back.

The face of the grandfather extremely familiar to most Americans because it appears at the heart of Willard’s Spirit of 76, Yankee Doodle, the work which catapulted the largely self-taught artist from Wellington, Ohio to sudden and unexpected artistic fame in 1876, when it was exhibited at the Philadelphia Centennial expedition and quickly became an icon of American patriotism in the process. In the Spirit of 76, a picture of a fifer and two drummers marching through a battlefield, the face of the central drummer is the same as that of the grandfather in Union Clubs painting, both ultimately based upon the likeness of an artist's own father. The Spirit of 76 was based on Willard’s experience of witnessing A patriotic parade in his home town of Wellington, Ohio

The tremendous popular success of Willard Spirit of 76 led to a mass commercialization of the image through chromolithography and photographs, as well as Willard’s decision to pursue a course of producing patriotic imagery for a living. Over the course of his life, Willard painted at least 12 versions of the Spirit of 76, and to this day the various institutions owning them remain in disagreement about which is the primary version. Interestingly, although he seemed fated to repeat his most famous composition, Willard never truly painted the same picture twice. He always changed some aspect of it, almost as though his intensely public but yet intensely personal message kept changing as did he over the course of years period

Men of the Revolution was on was an anonymous loan to the Union Club before it was eventually purchased from an unidentified estate. The enormous scale of the picture is not easily accommodated by most private residences, a fact that suggests that the painting was probably loaned to the club by the artist's heirs be the for the club raised sufficient funds to purchase it period