Washington Crossing the Delaware

From The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide, 1983

Click to enlarge.

14 EMANUEL GOTTLIEB LEUTZE, 1816-1868
Washington Crossing the Delaware
Oil on canvas; 149 x 255 in. (378.5 x 647.7 cm)

Many nineteenth-century painters, sculptors, and novelists created sentimentalized reconstructions of American colonial history. Inaccurate in many historical details, this painting is a conspicuous example of such Romantic imagery. The style is highly representative of a school of Romantic painting that flourished in Dusseldorf, where Leutze was living when he painted this picture in 1851. Worthington Whittredge, one of the American artists present while Leutze was working in Germany, posed for the figures of both Washington and the steersman. Gift of John S. Kennedy, 1897, 97.34