The Passage of the Delaware

In 1817 the State of North Carolina asked Thomas Sully, a Philadelphia portrait painter, for a heroic picture of George Washington to hang in the Senate chamber of its State House in Raleigh. Sully had been reading the memoirs of General James Wilkinson, just published, and chose a moment from them: the freezing night of 25 December 1776, when Washington's army crossed the Delaware River before the surprise attack on Trenton. He set Washington calm on a white horse at the water's edge, with anxious men all around him, and called the result a historical portrait. It came out about 12 feet high and 17 feet wide, far too big for the room, and in December 1819 the state withdrew the commission. In 1823 Sully sold it for 500 dollars to John Doggett, a Boston frame maker, who made the frame it still has today. Doggett sold it to Ethan Allen Greenwood for his New England Museum, and in 1839 it passed to Moses Kimball's Boston Museum, a theatre with halls of curiosities attached. In 1903 the owners of that old museum gave it to the Museum of Fine Arts. Among the men in shadow at the right is William Lee, the enslaved man who served as Washington's valet through the war.