Washington's Crossing Part I
A talk by Lee Vincent, Groton-Ledyard Rotary Club, April 27, 2004
Washington’s Crossing, 2004, by David Hackett Fischer
On Christmas morning, 1776, at 0-dark-hundred hours, General George Washington crossed the ice-choked Delaware River and personally led an attacking force to attack Hessian hired soldiers. We know all about that, don’t we? We know, because we have seen that painting. Well, no, the original painting was destroyed by an RAF raid on Berlin, where it was painted and where it had always been, in fact, but a 12’x20’ copy painted by the artist, Emmanuel Leutze, hangs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where I visited it last month.
That painting has been the subject of reverence as well as countless cartoons. We could never forget Washington standing up in the boat, of course. But as the source of what we know, that scene has many weaknesses. The flag in the painting was wrong, because it was a version of the stars & stripes, and that design wasn’t thought up until a year later. Floating chunks of ice don’t stick up in the air, and anyway the crossing was done in the extreme dark. But the artist made such a huge painting because the news and the reverberations of Washington’s crossing had a great effect in Germany and throughout Europe. Leutze’s painting was made – almost 75 years after the event – with a bold, rhetorical purpose: the purpose of inspiring more revolutions, in Europe.
You will
find download information on the last page.