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Secondary sourcePainting1931

The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere

Grant Wood · 1931

Grant Wood's 1931 painting imagining Revere's famous ride, showing how the story became an American legend.

A 20th-century painting imagining Revere's famous ride, showing how his story became American legend.

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Painting of a moonlit New England village at night. A tall white church steeple rises at left, with a rider on a dark horse on the road below. Houses with lit windows line the curving road, and trees and hills fill the background.
Grant Wood, The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, 1931. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

About this source

What it is

This 1931 painting by the American artist Grant Wood depicts Paul Revere during his midnight ride on the night of April 18, 1775, riding through a brightly lit Lexington, Massachusetts, seen from a high, bird's-eye viewpoint. It was inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1860 poem "Paul Revere's Ride." Wood reportedly used a child's hobby horse as a model for the horse. The painting is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Why it matters

This painting was made more than 150 years after the ride it depicts, and its stylized, toy-like forms show it is not a historical record but a modern artist's imaginative tribute. It demonstrates how Revere's real actions were transformed through Longfellow's poem into a national legend, and how 20th-century artists like Wood reshaped that legend again for their own time.

Look closer

  • What details in the painting look more like a storybook than a historical scene?
  • Why might Grant Wood have chosen a bird's-eye view and simplified shapes?
  • How does this image differ from what we know really happened on Revere's ride?

This painting is part of the curated material that grounds the AI version of Paul Revere on Humy.ai — when students ask about related events, the AI can quote it and cite it.

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