Emanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware is famous because it makes a desperate gamble look like destiny. Washington led his army across an ice-choked river on 25 December 1776 to surprise the enemy garrison at Trenton, and Leutze's huge 1851 canvas, more than 12 feet high and 21 feet wide, turned that night into one of the most widely reproduced images of an American historical event.
When the painting was first shown in New York in 1851, 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 gamble was real. By December 1776 the American army had lost the battles of White Plains and of Forts Washington and Lee and had retreated across New Jersey into Pennsylvania. Washington had only a few thousand men left, many of them without shoes, and their enlistments were about to expire.
His plan was to cross the Delaware on Christmas night and strike the Hessians, German soldiers hired by the British, who held Trenton. A victory would stun the British, capture supplies and revive morale.
Leutze's picture shows none of that doubt. Washington stands cloaked and upright, looking ahead through the ice, and nothing suggests that the plan might fail. That calm is Leutze's invention, and so are several other things in the boat.
The destiny was staged, and not in America. Leutze, a German-born painter who had grown up in the United States, lived in Düsseldorf, Germany, where he had gone to study in 1841. He painted the picture there, with American art students and tourists posing as the soldiers.
That origin became a problem near the end of World War I. In 1918, one newspaper story claimed that Leutze had been ignorant of American history, and that what the picture really showed was German soldiers.
The student who posed as Washington
The man in the cloak was a composite, and the main model was an American student. Worthington Whittredge, then studying in Düsseldorf, later recalled that he was "seized and made to do service twice, once for the steersman with the oar in my hand, and again for Washington himself."
Leutze had first tried German models and found them too small for his purpose. Whittredge stood two hours without moving so that Washington's cloak could be painted in a single sitting. The uniform, he said, was obtained by a fellow American artist, Eastman Johnson.
The face came from a third source. According to Whittredge, it was painted in profile from a bust of Washington by the French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon. Washington was assembled from a student's pose, a borrowed uniform and a plaster face. The ice under the boat came from much closer to Leutze's studio.
What You'll Discover
Which river runs behind the boat.
What the real night looked like.
What happened to the first two versions.
Where the third version ended up.