How Washington icon crossed the pond
From time to time over years of visiting The Metropolitan Museum of Art, I would find myself in front of Emanuel Leutze’s iconic “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” About 12 and a half feet high and 21 feet long, the huge rectangle was simply and plainly framed, hanging at just below knee height, if memory serves.
Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” 1851, Oil on canvas.
“It’s about the ice,” I would think each time I saw it; acres and acres of the stuff, wonderfully observed and presented in loosely brushed color and impasto white varnished to cast a glitter over the surface. Pyramids of men and perhaps a woman of various nations and stations, rearing horses and standing cannon all crossing a frozen river of glory in boats without names.
In the lead is a standing figure representing Washington, the center of a triangular composition along with a Scot, an African, Western sharpshooters, a trapper, what appears to be a pair of twins (one perhaps a woman), a Native American and future president James Monroe, a Noah’s Ark of intrepid democratic warriors in breaking dawn light headed to victory over a force of Hessian soldiers.
The painting has recently been cleaned as part of the reorganization of The Met’s American collection and is now cradled in a 3,000-pound gold-leaf frame surmounted by a shield and eagle and bristling with rifles and bayonets. The work is hung too high on the wall, making it difficult for the eye to adjust to its perspective and, I would think, especially difficult for children or seated viewers.
The painting has a curious story. Leutze’s father was a German political activist who had to escape the country with his family. Leutze grew up in Philadelphia and returned to Germany during the revolutions of 1848. His epic 1849 work was conceived to lift the flagging spirits of the ’48ers, as they have come to be called. It’s called “Sturm Und Drang,” inspired by the 1776 play of that title by Freidrich Klinger about the American Revolution and a German lad, frustrated by life under despotism, who crossed the sea to become a soldier in Washington’s army.
Leutze’s work is solidly in the tradition of German romanticism, which absorbed the Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) movement and produced paintings such as Caspar Wolf’s massive glaciers and the sea battles and avalanches of de Loutherbourg, as well as influencing American painters like Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Church and Thomas Cole, who hang with Leutze in the gallery.
The source of Leutze’s icescape was the Rhine, not the Delaware, and according to experts, the formations in the painting are uncharacteristic of Delaware River ice, which forms as slabs. Yet, ultimately the work is too big to fail, and even though it was badly damaged in Leutze’s studio after it was finished, the insurance company that took ownership exhibited it to great success. Leutze began a second version that was sent to New York in 1851, where it found 50,000 viewers and is to this day the most popular painting in The Met’s collection.
In our century, the work is more likely to be visited by groups of schoolchildren than by weary revolutionaries, but it remains an over-the-top monument to Leutze’s great goodwill and solidarity.
The original ended up in Bremen, where it was destroyed by the British in a bombing raid during World War II.
