Two Paintings, Two Stories of Washington Crossing the Delaware

Boston’s Art in the Americas Wing Offers a New Look at History

BOSTON—“Where is the Washington at the Delaware painting?” a recent visitor asked a guard at the Boston Museum of Fine Art’s sleek new Art of the Americas wing.

            “Right in there,” the guard said. “You can’t miss it.”
            Even though the painting is bigger than a dump truck, it can easily be missed, since the picture is not what some visitors expect. For years, Americans have had one particular “Delaware crossing” painting in mind—with General George Washington in a rowboat with a flag. Recently, however, the Boston museum unveiled a competitor image, and it will become known as the one with Washington on a horse by a tree.
            The more famous crossing of the Delaware painting has been known to American school children for years in their history textbooks. The less famous painting at the Boston Museum of Fine Art, “The Passage of the Delaware,” has been around just as long, but had been in storage for more than a century.
            In November, with the opening of the Art of the Americas wing, “Passage of the Delaware" finally was put on public display. It is a major centerpiece of the exhibit of American art. Over time, visitors will surely be sorting out the fact that the country now has two great paintings on this one great subject.
            The Boston painting is so large—17 feet by 12 feet—that it took a new wing to offer the necessary space. The painting was completed by the English immigrant Thomas Sully in 1819. It was commissioned by the North Carolina legislature but was too large to fit a government building. The canvas passed into the hands of a private Boston collector and, in 1903, was rolled up in storage at the Boston Museum of Art.
            Now it dominates an entire high-ceilinged room. “I thought ‘Washington Crossing the Delaware’ shows him in a rowboat,” said another visitor at the Boston venue. “Where is that one?”
            That one, the far better known “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. It was done by the German immigrant painter Emanuel Leutze in 1851. Though it is the most colorful and dramatic painting of the two, this Met treasure is more poetry than history. Most of the painting is factually wrong: neither the flag nor the boat is correct. In fact, Washington sat during the crossing in a homely horse barge.
            This is where the relatively unknown Sully painting in Boston makes its mark. As a history painter, Sully reconnoitered the actual location of the December 26, 1776 crossing, which took place on the Delaware River outside Philadelphia. After the crossing, Washington’s troops surprised the British mercenaries and reversed the fortunes of the war. Sully also interviewed a living participant.
            Sully’s vast painting, darkened by age but still dominated by Washington on a white horse, puts its historical details in the distant landscape: barges with 2,400 men and 18 pieces of artillery traverse the icy river. Up on a hill, Washington is ready to also make the crossing. He is surrounded by his three generals and servant.
            Eventually, Sully moved on to portrait painting. He did more than 2,600 portraits of the famous and the plebian, in effect the photographer of his era. His gigantic “Passage of the Delaware” (1819) came at the end of the craze for history paintings that recalled the great patriotic era of the Revolution. Other American painters, such as John Trumbull, also gave up history painting as the U.S. Congress tired of giant canvases about past glory. Trumbull’s last great history painting was his 1819 “Declaration of Independence” (18 feet by 12 feet), which adorns the back of the $2 bill and hangs in the U.S. Capitol.
            In 2004, the Brandeis historian David Hackett Fischer opened his Pulitzer Prize winning book, Washington’s Crossing, with the story of a museum visitor puzzling over the Met version of the 1776 event in the rowboat: “‘Washington’s Crossing!’ the stranger said with a bright smile of recognition. Then a dark frown passed across his face. ‘Was it like the painting?’ he said. ‘Did it really happen that way?’ The image he had in mind is one of the folk-memories that most Americans share.”
            Fischer’s book goes on to tell exactly what did happen that particular day.
            Today, photography and C-prints gives us all the history painting fit to print, though history painting on a smaller scale always is trying to make a comeback. When it comes to history painting, once the queen of the visual arts, the choices today are still about the same as those made by Sully and Leutze: to paint factually, or imaginatively?
            We now have two iconic examples of these choices. One is in New York and one in Boston, with Boston’s image of George Washington "about to cross" the Delaware rising in public consciousness, visit by visit.