Mistakes in Washington Crosses Delaware Painting

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the painting Washington Crossing the Delaware hangs in Gallery 760. It is a well-known oil on canvas painting of George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware River on Christmas night in 1776 to attack Hessians in Trenton, New Jersey during the American Revolution. Not only does it depict the future first President of America, but it also features the future fifth President, James Monroe.

One of the most famous paintings of the American Revolution, it was painted in Düsseldorf in 1851 by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, a German who grew up in the United States but returned to Germany as an adult. Born 40 years after the Battle of Trenton, Leutze had hoped that the spirit of Revolution would motivate the European liberal Revolutionaries in 1848. He did get a few things wrong, though.

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