Washington attraversa il Delaware

Leutze painted this in 1851, and he painted it in Germany, not America. He had grown up in the United States but was back in Düsseldorf when the failed European revolutions of 1848 were fresh, and he hoped that showing Washington's daring river crossing might stiffen the nerve of Europe's own reformers. He used American students and tourists as models, and even the icy river was the Rhine standing in for the Delaware. This is actually his second attempt at the subject. The first version stayed in Germany and was destroyed in an air raid on Bremen in 1942. The one you see, sent across the Atlantic, outlived it and became the image most Americans carry of that night in 1776.