The Battle of Princeton, c. 1782

The Battle of Princeton, c. 1782
by
James Peale (1749—1831)

Oil on canvas; 61.5 x 89.5 cm. (24 3/16 x 35 1/4 in.) Princeton University Museum of Art, Princeton, NJ.

James Peale was mostly a miniaturist and the brother of the more famous artist, Charles Willson Peale.

Assisting James was an apprentice in the brothers’ Philadelphia studio, William Mercer, the deaf-mute son of General Hugh Mercer, who was slain during the battle. Later, Mercer painted a copy of this painting.would executed his own copy of The Battle of Princeton.

The most inadvertently prophetic words that Adams ever uttered were his last: Thomas Jefferson survives. For it was the Jeffersonian image that broke free of the aggregated anonymity, the founders or the fathers, and eventually ascended into heaven with Washington. During the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Jeffersonian legacy became the most adaptable and all-purpose political touchstone in American political history.

— Joseph J. Ellis
Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams (1993)