How do we move away from being a civilization that produces art that causes comments like, “my five year old could make this,” back to being one that creates beauty and inspires deep questions? We must reject modernity and embrace tradition. To embrace tradition, we must first learn about it.
Let’s study art history together.
Washington Crossing the Delaware
Artist
Emanuel Leutze
Year
1851
Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
378.5 cm × 647.7 cm (149 in × 255 in)
Location
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and Minnesota Marine Art Museum in Winona, Minnesota, U.S.
Hannibal crossed the Alps. Caesar crossed the Rubicon. Napoleon crossed the Alps. Washington crossed the Delaware. It’s hard to beat an epic or historically significant military crossing over difficult terrain. The comparison for Washington is most strongly made with Caesar, though. One’s river crossing signaled the end of a Republic and the dawn of an Empire. The other’s crossing signaled a break from an empire and a Republic’s beginning. One man’s name became synonymous with power. Variants of the word “Caesar” have been used for two thousand years to indicate the highest government power (“Caesar,” “Kaiser,” “Czar, etc..” Washington handed back power and quietly retired.
There are even a lot of similarities with important distinctions between the two nations. America was founded by making these comparisons and distinctions on purpose. Washington D.C. sits on a location formerly known as Rome, Maryland. It was sold to the U.S. government by man named Francis Pope. D.C. overall was carved out of Virginia and Maryland. The District of Columbia, like Rome, is known to have seven hills: Capitol Hill, Meridian Hill, Forest Hill, Georgetown Hill, Navy Hill, Pleasant Hill, and Lincoln Hill. The U.S. capital is filled with Roman style architecture. D.C. even has a creek running through it named Tiber. American has been trying to be a new Rome since its first days.
All of this is context for the mindset at the time. The Founders made an overt attempt to create a new Rome, which was in a sense modeled intentionally and overtly on the old pre-Empire Rome. This held true in a lot of the art depicting America’s founders, too. When we see the painting above, we are intended to view Washington as a type of Caesar, except that he is putting right what once went wrong with the famous Roman General.
In lieu of f a time machine, America’s founding fathers had to “put right what once went wrong” in the means available to them.
So I hope that clears up what was happening in the 18th and 19th centuries. Intellectuals in Europe and the Americas were trying to bring back a golden age. This is why we see Napoleon on one side of the ocean, and Washington on the other, depicted through a lens of their Roman ancestors. Napoleon was a new kind of Caesar. Washington and the Americans took aim a few centuries earlier and thus Washington was a hero of the Republic (though Washington myth-makers used the comparison with Caesar to make that point.) Everyone agreed there was something great about Rome that they wanted to get back to, but not everyone agreed about the target.
Clearing up some history, though. The river at D.C. is the Potomac. So why was he crossing the Delaware? Well, D.C. didn’t exist yet, at least not as the capital. There wasn’t a reason to have a battle there (unlike The War of 1812 when there was fighting at the nation’s capital.) The Delaware is farther north and its Christmas crossing was the prelude to the surprise attack and victory at the Battle of Trenton. This was a key moment in the American War for Independence because it came on the heels of several Colonial military defeats. Without this victory, and the morale boost it created, momentum for the revolution may have died soon thereafter (and perhaps Americans would still be speaking English.)
But that’s not what happened. The colonists won the battle and eventually the war. The analysis of the war after indicated to the young country that this moment was a good one for patriotic myth-building. The painting is in that tradition and might be the best example in American history. Few Revolution images are more well-known. With context and hindsight, we see how much Washington is elevated by this myth-making. The work tells us that the Americans had a Caesar, or at least a potential one. This painting draws the comparison and benefits from the fact that it depicts a real moment in history. Yet rather than become personally powerful, Washington wanted a Republic with people who are powerful and free. The comparison with Caesar is intended to make Washington look like the greater of the two men.
If one was going to make another popular culture analogy to explain what’s going on here, one might refer to The Lord of the Rings, arguing that Washington is Aragorn, who didn’t seize the One Ring when he had the chance, while Caesar is Boromir, who gave into a weakness for power and tried to seize the ring. Both were great men, but the one who possessed self-restraint was the greater. The comparison with Boromir is necessary to show Aragorn’s greatness. Here the implied comparison to Caesar reveals Washington’s greatness.
Washington Crossing the Delaware (1849–1850), the first painting by Emanuel Leutze
Emanuel Leutze grew up in America, then returned to Germany as an adult, where he conceived the idea for this painting during the Revolutions of 1848. Hoping to encourage Europe’s liberal reformers through the example of the American Revolution, and using American tourists and art students as models and assistants, among them Worthington Whittredge and Andreas Achenbach, Leutze finished the first painting in 1850. Just after it was completed, the first version was damaged by fire in his studio, subsequently restored, and acquired by the Kunsthalle Bremen. On September 5, 1942, during World War II, it was destroyed in a bombing raid by the Allied forces.
The second painting, a full-sized replica of the first, was begun in 1850 and placed on exhibition in New York in October 1851. More than 50,000 people viewed it. The painting was originally bought by Marshall O. Roberts for $10,000—an enormous sum at the time, equivalent to approximately $350,000 in 2021. After changing ownership several times, it was finally donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by John Stewart Kennedy in 1897. Washington Rallying the Troops at Monmouth, Leutze’s companion piece to Washington Crossing the Delaware, is displayed in the Heyns (East) Reading Room of Doe Library at the University of California, Berkeley.
The painting was lent at least twice in its history. In the early 1950s, it was part of an exhibition in Dallas, Texas. Then, beginning in 1952, it was exhibited for several years at the United Methodist Church in Washington Crossing, Pennsylvania, not far from the scene of the painting. Today, it is on exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In January 2002, the painting was defaced when a former Metropolitan Museum of Art guard glued a picture of the September 11 attacks to it. No major damage was caused to the painting.
The simple frame that had been with the painting for over 90 years turned out not to be the original frame that Leutze designed. A photograph taken by Mathew Brady in 1864 was found in the New-York Historical Society in 2007 showing the painting in a spectacular eagle crested frame. The 12 ft x 21 ft carved replica frame was created using this photo by Eli Wilner & Company in New York City. The carved eagle-topped crest alone is 14 ft wide.
The third version of the painting, a smaller-scale version of the original, hung in the White House receiving room from 1979 to 2014. The painting was acquired by Mary Burrichter and Bob Kierlin, who contributed to the founding of the Minnesota Marine Art Museum in Winona, Minnesota, and put on display as the centerpiece of the museum’s American collection.
In May 2022, the third version of the painting was auctioned by Christie’s and sold for $45 million.
The painting is notable for its artistic composition. General Washington is emphasized by an unnaturally bright sky, while his face catches the upcoming sunlight. The colors consist of mostly dark tones, expected at dawn, and there are red highlights repeated throughout the painting. A foreshorteningperspective and the distant boats all lend depth to the painting and emphasize the boat carrying Washington.
The men in the boat represent a cross-section of the American colonies, including one in a Scottish bonnet and another of African descent facing backward next to each other in the front. A western rifleman is at the bow, two farmers in broad-brimmed hats are near the back (one with a bandaged head), and one at the stern wearing what appears to be Native American clothing to symbolize that all people in the new United States of America were represented.
According to the 1853 exhibition catalogue, the man standing next to Washington and holding the flag is Lieutenant James Monroe, future president of the United States, and the man leaning over the side is General Nathanael Greene. General Edward Hand is shown seated and holding his hat within the vessel.
Historical inaccuracies
The flag depicted is an early version of the flag of the United States (the “Stars and Stripes”), the design of which did not exist at the time of Washington’s crossing. The flag’s design was first specified in the June 14, 1777, Flag Resolution of the Second Continental Congress, and flew for the first time on September 3, 1777—well after Washington’s crossing in 1776. A more historically accurate flag would have been the Continental Union Flag, hoisted by Washington on January 1, 1776, at Somerville, Massachusetts, as the standard of the Continental Army and the first national flag.
Washington’s stance, intended to depict him in a heroic fashion, would have been very hard to maintain in the choppy conditions of the crossing. Considering that he is standing in a rowboat, such a stance would have risked capsizing the boat. However, historian David Hackett Fischer has argued that everyone would have been standing up to avoid the icy water in the bottom of the boat, as the actual Durham boats used were much larger, had a flat bottom, higher sides, a broad beam (width) of some eight feet and a draft of 24–30 inches. Washington’s boats were actually substantially larger than the boat in the painting. Washington and his men sailed on a cargo ship that ranged anywhere between 40 and 60 feet long (12 to 18 m). Also on the ships were heavy artillery and horses, which would not have fit in the boat Leutze painted.
In 1953, the American pop artistLarry Rivers painted Washington Crossing the Delaware, which is in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The painting has also inspired copies by Roy Lichtenstein (an abstract expressionist variant painted c. 1951) and Robert Colescott (a parody titled George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware painted in 1975). Grant Wood makes direct use of Leutze’s painting in his own Daughters of Revolution. The painting is a direct jab at the Daughters of the American Revolution, scrutinizing what Wood interpreted as their unfounded elitism.
William H. Powell produced a painting that owes an artistic debt to Leutze’s work, depicting Oliver Perry transferring command from one ship to another during the Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812. The original painting now hangs in the Ohio Statehouse, and Powell later created a larger, more light-toned rendering of the same subject which hangs in the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. In both of Powell’s works, Perry is shown standing in a small boat rowed by several men in uniform. The Washington painting shows the direction of travel from right to left, and the Perry image shows a reverse direction of motion, but the two compositions are otherwise similar. Both paintings feature one occupant of the boat with a bandaged head.
Liverpool born pop artist, Dirty Hans‘s painting “British Invasion” showing various rock and pop cultural icons from the 1960s, 70s and 80s in a boat crossing the Hudson River in New York and depicting David Bowie as a proxy for George Washington, appears to have drawn heavy influence from this painting
The Far Side comic for October 15, 1986, parodied the painting as “Washington crossing the street”.
For an absolutely outstanding and thorough review of this painting, which looks into the work’s immense size and its details, I highly recommend the following:
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