The most American picture ever painted was made in Düsseldorf. Emanuel Leutze painted it in a German studio, used the Rhine for the ice, and hired American tourists and art students as his soldiers. The flag in the boat had not been designed yet.
Everything in it is wrong
The flag first. The stars and stripes shown here was adopted on 14 June 1777; the crossing was on the night of 25 December 1776, six months earlier.
The boat is wrong too. The army crossed in Durham boats — long, black, high-sided freight boats built to carry pig iron down the river, big enough to take horses and cannon, which is exactly why they were used. What is in the painting is an open rowing boat with its gunwales a few inches above the water.
Nobody stands up in a boat in an ice-choked river either. Washington is standing, one foot braced, and so is the man holding the flag. The crossing itself was made in the dark, in sleet, between the evening of the 25th and three the next morning, and what Leutze painted is daybreak. Even the ice is borrowed: what is breaking up around the boat is ice he had watched on the Rhine.
Why a German painted it
Leutze was born in Württemberg and grew up in Philadelphia, and he went back to Germany to work, into an art school full of painters who took big historical subjects seriously.
He began this one in 1848, the year the German revolutions rose and were put down. The idea was to hold up a revolution that had worked to people who had just lost theirs. The picture is built for that job: not a general on a horse above the action, but a boat of ordinary men of several kinds, all rowing.
So it is a European painting, made in Europe, for Europeans, using American history as the argument. Then it was shipped across the Atlantic, put on show in New York in 1851, and taken entirely straight. It has been the standard picture of the crossing ever since, reproduced on stamps, in schoolbooks and on the back of a quarter.
Burnt, then bombed
There are three versions. The first was damaged by fire in his studio in 1850, restored, and bought by the Kunsthalle in Bremen, where it was destroyed in an air raid in 1942. The second went to New York in 1851 and is in the Metropolitan Museum: twelve feet high and twenty-one across. The third is smaller, hung in the White House for years, and sold at auction in 2022.
The corrections have been public for a hundred and seventy years. Everybody who writes about the painting lists them, and they have made no difference at all: the wrong flag, the wrong boat, the wrong hour and the wrong continent, and it is still the picture people see when they hear the words.
Burnt in 1850, bombed in 1942, twenty-one feet wide in New York. Wrong flag and all, it still ends up under somebody's glass.
Some stories are better over a coffee. Fifteen minutes with someone — audio only, not open yet.