Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851

Oil on canvas; 149 x 255 in. (378.5 x 647.7 cm). Painted in the artist’s studio in Düsseldorf, Germany. The first version, less grand, was destroyed by fire; this second version is over 21 feet wide. Originally displayed in New York and the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. In 1897 purchased by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY.

This iconic painting depicts General Washington leading a desperate Continental Army assault force across the Delaware River, from Pennsylvania to New Jersey, to defeat the Hessians, the day after Christmas, at the Battle of Trenton, 1776.

Colonel James Monroe holds the American flag; General Nathanael Greene, below Washington, gazes over the edge of the boat; Prince Whipple, slave to General William Wipple, may be the black man who works the oar on the left.

The head of Washington is based Houdon’s bust of the president from his life mask. Compare Thomas Sully’s version, less well-known, painted 30 years earlier.

As students of Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau are always reminding us, the age of reason was really an age of sentiment. In this too, Washington was a man of his age. When he established the first general decoration in the American Army, the Purple Heart, it was not (as it became in the twentieth century) an award available to all soldiers wounded in the line of duty. Only privates and noncomissioned officers could win the original Badge of Military Merit, a cloth-shaped heart sewn over the man’s actual heart, which allowed him to pass all guards and sentinels which officers are permitted to do. The symbol was not of heart’s blood shed, but of virtue proceeding from the heart. Limiting the award to nonofficers was meant to indicate that great virtue can be shown regardless of rank — that in Washington’s words, the road to glory in a patriot army and a free country is thus open to all.

— Garry Wills

Cincinnatus: George Washington & the Enlightenment (1984)