Die Kapitulation von Lord Cornwallis

Trumbull had actually served in the Continental Army during the Revolution before he became a painter, and when Congress commissioned him in 1817 to fill the Capitol rotunda, he set out to record the war as an eyewitness generation would want it remembered. This canvas shows the moment at Yorktown in October 1781 when the British army under Cornwallis surrendered, effectively ending the fighting. Cornwallis himself is absent. He claimed illness and sent a deputy, so Trumbull painted the American and French officers receiving the sword instead, the two allied lines facing each other across the field. Trumbull travelled to gather likenesses of the real officers wherever he could. He finished the huge picture in 1820 and supervised the hanging of it in Washington himself.