Washington Crossing the Delaware

1851

Oil on canvas, 378.5 × 647.7 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The general stands in a crowded boat as his men push through floating river ice. A turning point of the Revolution is painted on a monumental scale.

It won acclaim in the United States and in Germany, where Leutze was born.
Look at the mixed crew named by Scott Manning Stevens, an Akwesasne Mohawk cultural historian at Syracuse University, in the Met's audio guide: a Native American man at the stern, an African American man, farmers and soldiers.
It hangs in a copy of its original frame, rebuilt from a Mathew Brady photograph.
Stevens says Leutze meant to show the nation at its best, all of society aboard except women, yet calls it not reportage but near propaganda. The Met's narrator calls it accurate but ennobling of the war's violence, including against Native peoples.
Given to the Met in 1897 by John Stewart Kennedy.