TEACHING THE HISTORY of America’s founding to schoolchildren has become the new culture war, but perhaps some old artwork can provide a temporary truce. I speak of two historic paintings about “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” The event, which took place in December 1776, was the turning point in the colonial army expelling the British from American shores.
Such paintings, and two history books as well, can create a puzzle for young students, and puzzles are a great way to learn.
For years, Americans have had one particular “Washington crossing” painting in mind—with Washington in a rowboat and a flag. This painting has resided for years in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
Yet in the past decade, a rival painting has made its major showing. It is titled, “Passage of the Delaware,” and now hangs in the Boston Museum of Fine Art, a painting so large (17 feet by 12 feet) that it covers an entire wall.
The long hidden “Passage” painting has an interesting history. It was completed by the English immigrant Thomas Sully in 1819. The North Carolina legislature had commission the work, but it 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.
The more famous “Washington Crossing” painting has been known to American schoolchildren for years in their history textbooks. 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” came at the end of the craze for history paintings that recalled the great patriotic era of the Revolution.
Indeed, other great American painters, such as John Trumbull, who gave up history painting because the U.S. Congress became 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. Although neither painting is true to history, the Sully work is closer. A suggestion: present students with the two paintings, then ask them to read selections from the work by Fisher, or David McCullough’s 1776 (which ends with the December crossing), and analyze the difference between an artist’s goals and those of a historian.
History painting has gone by the wayside. But painters still must decide: to paint factually or imaginatively? Textbook publisher, too, have a dilemma, for which painting now will illustrate the history lesson?
Either way, for those seeking an antidote to the new push by the New York Times to make the “American founding” 1619—the year a slave ship arrived on American shores—the two paintings and two books about “the Crossing” offer a legitimate contrary view of how it all began, as a quest for political and economic liberty, not slavery.