America's most famous patriotic painting was made in Germany, with the Rhine as the river.
Emanuel Leutze painted Washington Crossing the Delaware in Düsseldorf, using American tourists as models and the Rhine as his river. The flag in it didn't exist yet, and the real boats were far bigger. His first version was destroyed in a 1942 RAF raid; the Met holds the full-size replica.
On the night of 25–26 December 1776, George Washington led the Continental Army across the icy Delaware River for a surprise attack on Hessian troops at Trenton. Seventy-five years later, Emanuel Leutze, who had grown up in America and returned to Germany, made it into an epic. He conceived it during the European revolutions of 1848, hoping the American example would inspire Europe's liberal reformers.
He painted it in Düsseldorf, using American tourists and art students as models, and the river behind is modelled on the Rhine. The first version was damaged by a fire in his studio, restored and bought by the Kunsthalle in Bremen, where it was destroyed in a British bombing raid in 1942. A full-size second version went on show in New York in 1851, drew more than 50,000 visitors and sold for 10,000 dollars, a huge sum. It was given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1897. A smaller third version sold at auction in 2022 for 45 million dollars.
Leutze filled the boat with a deliberate cross-section of the new nation: a man in a Scottish bonnet, a man of African descent, a western rifleman, farmers and a figure in what looks like Native American dress. According to an 1853 catalogue, the man holding the flag is the future president James Monroe.
It is not a documentary. The Stars and Stripes shown did not exist until the Flag Resolution of June 1777. The boats Washington used were large cargo vessels, some 12 to 18 metres long, carrying horses and artillery. Washington's heroic stance would be risky in a rowing boat, though the historian David Hackett Fischer suggests everyone may have stood in the real flat-bottomed boats to keep out of the icy water.
Source: Wikipedia — Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851 paintings) · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
