Washington Crossing the Delaware

Emanuel Leutze painted this scene of George Washington crossing the Delaware River on Christmas night, 1776, in Germany in 1851. He had never been to the Delaware River. He painted it in his studio in Dusseldorf, using the Rhine as a reference and an American tourist as the model for Washington. The painting is more myth than document, and it was meant to be. The canvas is gigantic, over 12 feet tall and 21 feet wide. Washington stands at the bow of a flat-bottomed Durham boat, one foot braced forward, his face turned toward the far shore. The flag, a version of the Betsy Ross design with 13 stars, flies behind him. The boat is packed with soldiers: a man breaking ice with an oar, a farmer holding his hat, a woman disguised as a man, a Black soldier rowing at the stern. The ice is jagged and theatrical. The sky is a turbulent gray-blue with a break of light on the horizon. Leutze was a German-born painter who grew up in the United States and returned to Germany to study at the Dusseldorf Academy. He painted the first version of this subject in 1849, during the revolutions that swept Europe, as a statement about democratic ideals. That version was damaged in a studio fire and eventually destroyed in a World War II bombing. This second version, painted in 1851, is the one that survived and came to New York. The painting arrived in New York in 1851 and was exhibited to enormous crowds. It toured the country for years and became the image of the American Revolution that every schoolchild recognized. The historical inaccuracies are well known: the flag shown did not exist in 1776, the boats were wrong, the river never looked like that. But the painting was never trying to be a photograph. It was building a national myth, and it succeeded completely. Oil on canvas, 378 by 648 centimeters. Leutze used a dark underpainting and built the figures in thick, opaque layers. The ice and water are painted in cool blues and whites over warm browns, giving the surface a sense of depth and movement. The scale of the original means that even the largest print available captures only a fraction of the detail. The wide horizontal format makes this print ideal for a long wall: above a sofa, above a fireplace mantel, or in a dining room. The cool palette and historical subject suit traditional interiors with wood furniture and warm lighting. The 18x24 size is the best choice for most rooms, as the composition needs width to read properly. The painting entered the Met's collection in 1897, gifted by John Stewart Kennedy. It hung in the entrance hall of the museum for decades and is now in the American Wing. This is a public domain artwork (CC0), scanned from the original at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.