Emanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware is famous because it makes a desperate gamble look like destiny. On the night of 25 December 1776, Washington took his army across an ice-choked river to surprise the enemy at Trenton, and Leutze painted the scene in 1851 on a canvas more than 12 feet high and 21 feet wide.
When it was first shown in New York that year, five thousand people came to see it in less than two weeks, and one critic called it "the grandest, most majestic, and most effective painting ever exhibited in America." It now hangs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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The destiny was staged, and not in America. Leutze painted the picture in Düsseldorf, Germany, with American art students and tourists posing as the soldiers.
In the picture, Washington is calm. He stands cloaked and upright, looking ahead through the ice, and nothing suggests that the whole plan might fail. That calm is Leutze's invention, and so are several other things in the boat.
Near the end of World War I, in 1918, that began to matter. One newspaper story claimed Leutze had been ignorant of American history, and that what the picture really showed was German soldiers.
What You'll Discover
Who really posed as Washington.
Which river runs behind the boat.
What the real night looked like.
What happened to the first version.
What a smaller copy sold for.