[Thomas Melville, bust, facing left, in his Continental hat"]"

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Thomas Melville appears here as a bust in profile, facing left, wearing a Continental hat, a detail that signals the wearer's allegiance to the patriot cause during the American Revolution. Melville is associated with Boston's resistance to British taxation in the 1770s, and engraved likenesses like this one were often produced for broadsides, magazines, or commemorative sets that kept such figures before the public. The caption card gives no date, so the engraving's exact origin is uncertain, but its style and subject place it within the decades following the war, when portraits of patriots were widely circulated.

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