Image source: Wikimedia Commons (CC0). View source
Washington Crossing the Delaware
Emanuel Leutze · Realism & Academic
- Artist
- Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze (1816–1868)
- Date
- 1851
- Dimensions
- 378.5 x 647.7 cm
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Location
- Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, United States
Washington Crossing the Delaware commemorates the night of 25–26 December 1776, when George Washington led his army across the icy Delaware River to launch a surprise attack on enemy troops at Trenton, a turning point of the American Revolutionary War.
A closer look
Washington stands heroically in the bow of a crowded boat, gazing ahead, while soldiers of every background row and push through floating blocks of ice. Behind him, a young officer holds up the Stars and Stripes. Many details are historically wrong: the flag did not yet exist, the boat would have been larger, and standing in it would have been unwise. But Leutze, a German-American painter working in Düsseldorf, aimed for an inspiring national image rather than accuracy, and he succeeded.
History of the painting
The version now in New York was shown in a gallery on Broadway in 1851, where tens of thousands of people paid to see it. After passing through private collections, it was given to the Metropolitan Museum in 1897. Leutze's first version, damaged in the studio fire and later repaired, was bought by the Kunsthalle in Bremen; it was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid in 1942. In 2011 the Met restored the surviving canvas and placed it in a replica of its original carved frame, topped by an eagle.