Oil on canvas.
To ensure accuracy, Friberg, an American Artist, studied Washington’s actual uniform at the Smithsonian Institution and sketched during the winter near the banks of the Schuylkill River at Valley Forge, PA.
It was a cold that chilled to the bone,
he said, a cold that froze my fingers until I could no longer sketch nor even snap my camera.
The disarrayed condition of the colonies in 1764 — economies and societies in flux with changes wrought by war, governments trying simultaneously to adjust to international peace and cope with the effects of Indian insurrections — helps explain how the colonists reacted to British efforts to reform imperial relations.… But the single most significant factor was the depression that by 1764 had fastened a clammy grip on trade in every colony, and which would not fully release it until the decade had ended.