The Art of the American Revolution Across the Generations

Books & the Arts

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June 11, 2026

Crossing the Delaware

The art of the American Revolution over time

The United States’ founding moment from Washington Crossing the Delaware to the paintings of Jacob Lawrence, Kara Walker, and Kent Monkman.

Jacob Lawrence, detail from Struggle Series—No. 10: Washington Crossing the Delaware , 1954.

Although I must have visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art hundreds of times, I’ve never spared more than a glance for Washington Crossing the Delaware. The painting has always seemed to me more image than object, an untethered graphic whose transposability yields it to all sorts of uses—such as when, earlier this year, it was projected onto the Washington Monument. Having seen it on commemorative coins, ceramic plates, tea towels, and postage stamps, why would I need to seek it out in person?

It is perhaps this transposability, this reproducibility, that also leaves Washington Crossing the Delaware so open to reworkings. Almost a dozen modern and contemporary artists have riffed on it, among them Jacob Lawrence, Robert Colescott, Grant Wood, Alex Katz, and Kent Monkman. Some of these artists have drawn on the Crossing ’s status as an American icon to make political statements. In 2017, Kara Walker reworked the painting to comment on Trump’s inauguration. Other explorations have tended toward formal reinvention. A young Roy Lichtenstein, before his Pop Art breakthrough, painted two versions in an abstract, naïve style around the same time that Larry Rivers offered a brushy, sketchy reinterpretation, at least partly as a figurative challenge to the hegemony of Abstract Expressionism among New York painters. Each refashioning is both a departure and a return.

These reworkings affirm the status of the Crossing as a foundational American image, even as they offer new visions of the nation’s past and future—and help us understand how the painting itself worked as a political intervention into both the myth and the politics of the United States.

To approach the many reworkings of Washington Crossing the Delaware , one must begin with the original. Heading to the Met’s American Wing, I spotted it practically a mile away, occupying one of the gallery’s foremost sight lines. It is oppressively large, at 12 by 21 feet, and insistently framed, in a gilded setting topped with a patriotic trophy—a replica of the frame it originally appeared in during its first showing in New York, in 1851, the year of its completion. The painting, by the German artist Emanuel Leutze, shows the crossing of the Delaware River on the night of December 25, 1776, a maneuver that allowed the Continental Army to launch a surprise attack on the Hessian forces at Trenton, yielding a victory that marked a turning point in the American Revolution. Maybe you can see it in your mind’s eye: George Washington standing in the prow of a rowboat, his raised leg firmly planted on the seat before him, gazing steadfastly ahead. All about him, soldiers strain at the oars, propelling the boat across an ice-choked river; one clutches a furled American flag. The scene is grand, the style exacting and meticulous.

The tour guides (five of them, to be precise) who pass through the gallery during the half-hour I spend with the painting invariably noted its “inaccuracies.” Leutze shows Washington and his men in narrow rowboats, when in reality they made the crossing in wide, flat-bottomed freight boats. Although the crossing took place at night, Leutze shows a breaking dawn. One guide questioned whether the central figure really looked like Washington, whose likeness survives only in paintings. Another noted the “German” elements of the work, pointing out that the chunks of ice that float on the surface of Leutze’s Delaware look more like formations on the Rhine than those on the waterways of America’s Northeast.

I found this strange. Washington Crossing the Delaware is a constructed representation, not a stand-in for Washington himself or a mirror of the historic crossing—an event that Leutze’s painting postdates by three-quarters of a century. While the Crossing reflects the wave of reverence for the “father of the country” that swept the United States upon the 50th anniversary of Washington’s death, another of its immediate contexts are the Revolutions of 1848.

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Leutze, born in 1816 in Württemberg, immigrated with his family to Philadelphia as a child. In 1841, he returned to Europe to study at the Royal Academy of Art in Düsseldorf. There, he trained in the genre of history painting, developing large-format compositions with grand and consequential themes. While in Düsseldorf, he cofounded and led Malkasten (“paint box”), a democratic organization of liberal artists who supported the struggle to establish a unified German republic. Although the fragmentary and uncoordinated German uprisings of 1848 were ultimately crushed, Leutze did not abandon his democratic commitments. His Crossing , which toured in Düssel…