Observations.
Let’s just divorce ourselves from everything we know and describe what we see.
There are a lot of people in a kind of flotilla of small boats, in action and it seems moving in the same direction.
They are lit from behind. By a star or the moon or whatever wisp of sun is breaching a cloudy sky.
It is cold. The figures are clad in heavy clothing, bundled, and are huddled against the wind with the exception of the two tallest central figures. More on those two central figures but for now, notice how they seem utterly unaffected by the temperature.
The body of water they are on is full of ice. They all struggle to move through it. In fact, notice all the oars move up to the right although they are apparently heading off in the direction the tall guys face, to the left.
There is nothing ‘uniform’ about the characters in the first boat, certainly not their apparel. The three in the front: a coonskin hatted fellow, a Scottish tam-ed bloke, a person of color, earring-ed and wearing a leather fisherman’s cap. So, likely a trapper, a recent Scottish immigrant, and a New England cod fisherman, a typical occupation for a freed slave or Portuguese person of color.
The two folks around the big guys: another trapper. And that’s another uniformed man on lookout.
Then we have a fellow in a blousy red tunic and rather luxurious hair. Wait. Is that a fellow? One more military-looking chap and then not one but two Charles Ingalls, very farmer-looking lads bookended by a fellow wearing a distinctly local satchel of the Delawarean Leni Lenape. Hmmm. Why is HE steering we wonder….
Notice that anything of the natural world is of a cool palette, while anything of the humans is warm, despite only being backlit by a sliver of a source.
What I can’t convey here is the size.
The painting is absolutely staggering in proportion, approximately 12 x 20 feet, too large for any private collection.
Painted in 1850. Who could this be for? Who was the intended audience? Why paint a painting depicting an event that took place 75 years earlier?
Let’s stir in the history we know.
You like a good bet? By the bitterly cold Christmas of 1776, the American Revolution was not one. At all. Unless you were betting British. After 1775’s really rough start at Lexington and Concord (Oddsmakers gave the ultimate survival of America 99:1 odds, America the 1%) and a bad showing at Bunker Hill (Oddsmakers 95:5) it was the British fall at Ticonderoga and the birth of US patriotism with the signing of the Declaration of Independence mid-1776 that salvaged the movement at all. (Oddsmakers 78:22). But from August to November of 1776, New York Harbor was swarming with the unparalleled British fleet, a navy as never before seen in any World let alone the New, brothers General Howe and the elder Admiral Howe, tag-teaming Viscounts,0 commanded a very professional army and navy respectively, with numbers swollen by German mercenary troops brought in for a quick final flourish of a finish and indeed together delivered a series of crushing blows throughout New York leading to the fall of NYC, demoralizing on every level, and the Continental Army chased clear across NJ into Pennsylvania. It’s no wonder people hate the Jersey Turnpike! 1777 was set to start with a 12% chance of an American victory by your bookie, down a full ten points from the high.
Washington, on the other hand, commanded an untrained force of ill-equipped uneducated immigrants whose languages were as varied as their uniforms. And conscriptions were running out faster than the deserters running only slightly ahead of them. For now.
It would take a game changer, NOW, to stay in the independence game or the hopes of a realized Enlightenment and the flame those brilliant minds ignited might die on that very cold Stille Nacht. That game changer is what we have depicted here on a fittingly monumental scale by our friend the very German very American Emanuel Leutze. Much more on him to come.
Christmas Day Washington and his troops gathered on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River. They were planning to jump the 1500 Hessians encamped in Trenton early the morning of the 26th and carry the day with a bit of on-the-fly guérilla warfare, American style. Two other outfits were to cross at two other points, but it says much about the weather, the river, the bitter icy cold that only Washington’s outfit made it across. (More likely on wide flat bottomed boats that used overhead ropes strung across a narrow stretch of river to pull themselves across.) So instead of 6,000 men, Washington would have to make due with his 2400 UN-delegate band of ragamuffins. His Christmas morale booster had doom written all over it.
Or perhaps that is exactly what the exceedingly clever Mr. Washington wanted us to think. But that Christmas of 1776, he was not playing any reindeer games. It was indeed perhaps the last time assumptions were ever made in war. It was assumed Washington would take the holiday. It was assumed he’d never try to make such a perilous crossing. In the dark. It was assumed someone wound see their red noses coming a mile away on the nine it took to march inland. But the outlooks who assumed the holiday took the night off themselves. All of those assumptions cost the crown their empire and more immediately, spelled misfortune for the Hessians, 22 of whom were killed, 900 of whom were captured, the balance für die Berge fliegen, a good lot blending into the landscape and becoming de facto Americans. (Never assume mercenaries will fight your cause with your gusto.) Washington lost two men. To exposure. But what he gained…
Almost all of his men re-enlisted and as word spread of this very American victory, recruits began to pour in. Soon, a major victory at Saratoga would convince the French that America was a cause célèbre and their financing, their recognition of sovereignty, and their generals turned a war of isolation into a conflict with international implications, a world war, really, and although the struggle would slog on through another six bloody, awful years—the misery of Valley Forge and the horrors of the prisoner ships were still on the menu don’t forget—we would almost certainly have never become a country and a beacon of liberty, had not George Washington, with wingmen James Monroe and Nathanael Greene, the fighting Quaker, inspired the dispirited, unified the un-uniformed, kicked the crap out of the ice and some Krauts (war always opens that racism door…) and fanned what seemed the last ember of freedom’s fire into a roaring blaze—against all odds.
So what compelled a German American German to spend two years of his life painting that fulcrum’s moment in 1851?
Crossing the Delaware. The artist.
Emmanuel was not the best student but his knack for doodling blossomed into a talent for drawing and when his father took to his deathbed from cancer, young Emmanuel honed his skills in portraiture, selling miniatures for five bucks a pop. The age before photography did not mean an age without narcissism and Emmanuel did well enough to support himself and study with John Rubens Smith, one of America’s premier illustrators of our early urbanscapes. Smith’s paintings of Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore are some of the most accurate resources as documents of early 19th Century America. Hmmm. Capturing the lay of the land. File that. Smith encouraged Emmanuel to exhibit and one of his works, Portrait of a Lady, led to some critical recognition and enough orders to fund formal study. He chose the Kunstakademie (Art Academy) in Düsseldorf, and in 1841, at the age of 24, set sail for Europe.
Of course, off to the homeland makes sense. But Düsseldorf is 300 miles north of Schwäbisch Gmünd and in 1841, no high speed rail is making that close. It wasn’t going ‘home.’ We’re not sure why he chose the Kunstakademie, and by we’re not sure I mean I’m not sure. I looked and looked. Suffice to say for now the painting would certainly look different had he chosen some other school and its prevailing aesthetic.
And for now let me clear this up a bit. When speaking of Germany, ‘Germany’ exists more as a concept in 1841 than anything else. As a matter of fact, if you want your head to spin, watch the video I’m posting in the comments section about Central Europe’s borders from 1789 (Hmmm, 1789. File that.) to the present. It’s easier to keep up with the Kardashians. (But you see where all those delicious words for little kingdoms and duchies come from, Bohemia,Thuringia, Saxony, Pomerania, etc.). In 1841, Germany is pulling itself back together after Napoleon tore through the joint and toppled no less than Charlemagne’s flipping Holy Roman Empire, then set his beady greedy little Corsican black eyes on Russia. In winter. You know the rest. If you don’t, let’s just say in colder weather? He was no George Washington. And—granted along with some solid civil law—he left seeds of unrest everywhere in his wake. It was harvest time in Europe.
O come o come Emmanuel to Düsseldorf in Westphalia, one of the 39 states that make up the loose and troubled North German confederacy, an autocracy developing into the wobbly Kingdom of Prussia, broiling with dangerous ideas but bathed by the mighty Rhine. It seems you fancy rivers.
The Enlightenment.
We left Leutze hesitant, holding his conte crayons and standing on the verge of the Kuntzakademie in Düsseldorf. (If you ever want to affect a German accent, hit that umlaut in Düsseldorf and you sound like you carved a cuckoo clock this morning.) Let’s unravel the entire human history that brought him to this threshold. In four paragraphs.
That we, as human beings, evolved one step out of the food chain left us a luxury no species had enjoyed certainly to the extent we do: Time. We have time to pause. And in the infinity of a pause we held a mirror up to ourselves and a telescope in our longer arm and saw ourselves in the universe, gloriously contemplative, coupled with the curiosity we inherited. The world used to happen to its creatures. For better or worse, we could change the world. And the power of that knowledge led to a great respect for the dignity of each of us, based not on some archaic right of progeny but by what each of us brought to the table. The overwhelming logic of that notion seemed collective in its first full-flowered realization, Ancient Greece. And while Rome put the whole program on steroids and gave up a few milestones in human philosophical achievement to pave the Apian Way, they did move the ball forward.
But Ides beware, the history of democracies is littered with hard-fought rights tossed back with hardly a care to those for whom power is the goal. And the light of Greece and the fire of Rome burnt themselves out as we plunged into one of the most bloody, fearful, plague-ridden miserable epochs in human history, absolute monarchs sitting on capricious haphazard thrones while the masses toiled in serfdom, hopeless save for the quick exit. Life expectancy was 25 years for a serf.
It is a testament to the capital T Truth of the loftier human efforts towards dignity and liberty and freedom that they persist in small movements that gain momentum and once again express themselves in the Body Politic. And although pockmarked with undulations, that was the next great arc of the human condition beginning with, of course, the Arts of the Renaissance, whose sublime beauty and inherent truths were the prototypes for scientific explorations and an optimism fueled by civility and a wealth that brought the life expectancy up to 35! That wealth consolidated itself though, and with a only few exceptions like the Dutch merchant class, not in the people but those very few people who conveniently claimed God chose them to lead, the anointed who sat their fat fannies on purple cushions and hoped for demanding sons whose entitlements were breathtaking. All in the family, these dynasties remain powerful to this day on a number of persistent thrones into which even an Oprah interview can’t throw a wrench side wise.
This would not stand though. This would not stand the construct, the very anatomy of the human brain whose trillions of sparkling synapses were working out better ways every day and exponentially. The next great movement in human history would challenge the seemingly impenetrable old order in ways that resonate with consequences to this very day.
If the Renaissance taught us proportion, sensation, this next epic chapter would teach us perspective, perception. It’s fathers, standing on the shoulders of Galileo and Copernicus and Ptolemy, would author the empirical blueprints of humanity and our relationship to the stars. And they were starry, Isaac Newton, John Locke, David Hume, Rene Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, Thomas Paine, they shown as if lit from within these enlightened. The world was giving birth to the Age of Enlightenment. And it would be a very difficult labor.
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Something’s in the air: Springtime or
The Age of Revolution, the worldwide phenomenon stretching from 1789 to the mid 1800s has its roots in 1760s Colonial America. A direct outgrowth of The Enlightenment, the Declaration of Independence is perhaps the most enlightened rational sound steady stable document ever produced. It simply but thoroughly lists the reasons a separation was not so much necessary as it was inevitable. Its truths are empiracle and indisputable. It reads without malice nor cries for redress or retribution. There would be no regicide, the British Monarch was not the issue. It reads easily: Time to go.
Of course nearly every word, every bit of punctuation fell to scrutiny and debate, the particular needs of the sprawling thirteen colonies were just as sprawling, varied and unique. And that was the easy part. Fighting the war, acquiring international recognition and ambassador posts, crafting a confederacy, creating an economy, scrapping that to write another inspired masterpiece, the US Constitution and to set this ship sailing battered and broke as it was. What made it work was that despite having vastly different oars, everyone was rowing in the same direction: Get the United States of America afloat.
Sparks across the sea did fly and settled first in France. But their Revolution was out for blood, rivers of it and rolling heads, the slicing sound in the sluice at la Place de la Concorde separating the French glitterati from us and from themselves. What emerged though was the revelation the French were slightly ambivalent about the titular head of their government, their country, well their empire, was it kingdom? The Republic!
After Napoleon’s defeat a host of European uprisings and skirmishes erupted in almost every region of the continent. At stake were the thrones of Europe. And the rise of the Middle Class. And no area was more ripe for revolt than the Duchies around Düsseldorf. The Spring Uprising of 1848 breaks out in pocket putsches throughout Prussia for two years and all around the eyes and ears of Emmanuel Leutze.
Leutze is in full favor of the manifestos backing these uprisings. Representative governments, fair wages, prison reforms, and an all-around respect for the rich, and the poor, and the bulging middle bourgeoisie. But, as you recall, there is no “Germany” in 1848, just 39 states with very different expectations from a Revolution. It seems impossible to make any significant gains or to take on the spectre of the Kingdom of Prussia without some sense of common purpose. What metaphor might prove handy he wondered, the young boy turned artist who’d grown up in young America, America’s cradle in fact, in Philadelphia on the Delaware River near a narrow stretch in particular?
Finishing the hat. Dotting the i’s. Simmering the soup. Crossing the Delaware, together.
Armed now with a lot of background and our initial close examination of the painting, let's make soup.
Emmanuel Leutze studies only one year at the Kuntzakeademie Düsseldorf but its influence informs nearly every brushstroke of his from then on. In 1842, the Akademie is known for fostering a kind of subdued naturalism, and you see that in Leutze’s understated palette, and his extraordinary attention to detail. Just look at a close up of that ice. It is I feel a reaction to the fiery Romanticism, the mysteriousness and emotional heights and chasms that swept Europe with Beethoven and not inconsequentially, Napoleon. Look at the painting. There is tension and drama, but it is not coming from the tranquility and the realism of the icy morn, excellent and fair.
It is from his mentor Akademie Direktor Fredrich von Schadow that Leutze borrows the heart.
A generation earlier Von Schadow followed many of his colleagues to Rome both to study and gain commissions painting the apartments of German consulates to the Vatican. They became enamored with a kind of Middle Ages aesthetic of spirituality in art, and the style they brought back to Germany garnered them the nickname, the ‘Nazarenes.’ Put a pin in that.
In 1842, two big events. One: Leutze makes his own journey to Rome, passionately studying the works of Titian and Michaelangelo. You can smell them all over this Crossing. And two: Leutze paints his first masterpiece, Christopher Columbus before the Council of Salamanca, one of six count em SIX paintings he'll create bearing the weight of the reputationally-challenged explorer. The attention this group painting received—it hangs in the Louvre today for heaven's sake (his better Columbus before the Queen hangs in the Brooklyn Museum, come!!!) —sealed Leutze’s lot as a working artist.
Not being much of a student, you’ll recall, he never finishes his studies at the Akademie, but falls in love with one Julianne Lotner, marries, and settles down in Düsseldorf for the next 15 years.
FUN FACT: Emmanuel and Julianne welcome a son one day in November, 1847. Eugene Harry Cozzens Leutze, who, much like his father, is born in Germany and moves with his parents to America one day. One day, he gets an appointment to the US Naval Academy. From Abraham Lincoln. He is aboard the famed Monticello during the Civil War and the famed Monterey during the Spanish American War, the day one day, in the Philippines with Admiral Dewey, he’s there for the capitulation of Manila. One day, he is promoted to Rear Admiral. To honor his memory, one day in 1942, the destroyer USS Leutze is launched. And one day, the main parade ground at the Washington Navy Yard is named for him. The son of the man whose legendary painting depicts one of the first naval operations in American history became an Admiral in the US Navy. Something to think about one day, this Monday (just seeing if you’re paying attention.)
As a German American German with some time on his hands, he attracts a niche market of visiting American tourists, ex-pats, and American art students studying in Germany. Put a pin in that.
He also passionately flings himself into the political climate and finds him fully sympathetic towards the progressive movements swirling around him.
We have a German American German naturalist painter who lived in Philadelphia with a spiritual bent and an encyclopedic knowledge of Italian Baroque masters living in pre-revolutionary Prussia in need of a singularity of purpose, an artist who already has a reputation as adept at group paintings. Oh. And easy access to any number of eager American models.
Soups ready.
Together, we cross the Delaware
In 1849, the March Revolution of 1848 splintering around him, Leutze sets his brush to a major canvas.
Washington Crossing the Delaware is to be seen by a population, not over someone’s sofa. It is to be seen by a population whose purpose is floundering, whose moment in history when you break it down might have thwarted TWO world wars. It will have to be big. As must be its message. Look at this boatload of the miscast, this Benetton ad of the cross section of the New World. They row together. The farmers have different dreams than the trappers. The odds are entirely stacked against them. Row together. They can’t even talk to each other, many of them. No one understands the Scottish guy despite his constant guttural protestations he’s speaking English. But they can taste something in the cold air. Just row together. In a land where a freed slave shares a boat with two future Presidents of the United States, a woman backing them up and being guided by a native, anything is possible. If they’ll just row together. It is the land of possibility that is the goal. The goal simply stated in this work of art? Let’s row together, in the same direction to get there. E pluribus unum.
Technically, Leutz infuses it with biblical proportion. That strange light we talked about? It comes from within the painting, from Washington almost, a Michaelangelo mountain of a man, who not incidentally had died exactly 50 years ago that year, here, the only figure in full profile, ready for the coin, E pluribus unum thank you very much. The odd angle of the oars we mentioned given their direction? The oars in the bow are pointing towards Washington, the oarsmen in the stern are pulling towards him, the man so driven by purpose he seems oblivious to the immediate obstacles like the horrendous weather let alone those ahead like the nine mile march on the other side with only 1/3 of the men he’d counted on to take on professional soldiers (from—oh that’s right! Germany!) This giant (and he was at 6’2”in 1776, giant) radiates confidence.
Leutze has every element in this sprawling enormous painting drawing our eye to this singularity. If it is a masterpiece, for me, it lies at the very least in his extraordinary composition.
While there is no direct evidence Leutze ever physically encountered Rembrandt’s masterpiece and only nautical painting, one must assume he had, given his education and the way he so thoroughly references its magic. While the visceral intensity and immediacy of The Storm on the Sea of Galilee is inherently more dramatic, a terrifying wave upending their boat and ripping the sail in half, Rembrandt heightens the moment using very similar compositional tools: an ambiguous light source creates a stunning portal, although here the light pulls our eye to an apostle. It is his angle and every other in the work that pulls us to the ethereal figure, lit from within at the stern and the only the only figure in full profile, a calm in the storm, the gentle Christ, confident and caring. It is that move Rembrandt forces on our eye, from apostle to Christ—raise your hand if you did it, I see all your hands up—making us active kinetic participants in the drama, that gives him the edge here, and why nobody ever beats Rembrandt. And the master had one other trick up his sleeve. Twelve apostles and Christ. Thirteen. Who is that fourteenth man, the man where Leutze seats Major Nathaneal Greene? It’s a self-portrait of Rembrandt, looking directly at us, the only one in what feels like a confessional, his testament to a very human crisis of faith to which we can all relate. It is a genius work and if Leutze were to stand on anyone’s shoulders, there are none better.
SAD FACT: I would invite you all to Boston so we could encounter Rembrandt’s masterpiece together, but it was stolen there from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990 and these 31 years later still remains lost to the world. Such a tragedy.
SIMILAR FACT: So too, fickle Fate might have robbed us this shared moment and twice. Leutze finishes the work in 1850 and shortly afterwards it is damaged in a fire in his studio. So he paints an exact version as a ‘safety’ that is shipped to NYC and exhibited in 1851 where some 50,000 people clamor for tickets. (His third smaller version hung in the White House from 1979 until recently and now hangs in the Minnesota Marine Art Museum in Winona.) The first work was restored and acquired by the Kuntshalle Bremen where if all things, it was destroyed by Allied bombers in 1945. It is the second exact iteration by the artist’s hand that hangs at The Met in an exact replica of the original’s magnificent gilded frame, topped with an enormous crested eagle and crafted from one of the world’s first photographs, by Matthew Brady, the first Presidential photographer.
And finally.
Earlier I went on about our emergence from the food chain. The uniqueness of that position manifests itself not only in the contemplative nature of humans but in our active purposeful creation of what we call culture as well. There are many ways to describe culture, but for our purposes let’s call it the expressions of what we value, the representations of our truth, the reality of our journey.
There is only so much real estate set aside to memorialize these objet d’art our better prophets produce. So as I’ve told all of you when we got to The Met, if something finds it’s way to a wall there, bet your bottom dollar a species-wide consensus has been reached about it: What lies before you is a masterpiece. Of truth. While you are free to agree or not, pause to consider.
The truth Emmanuel Leutze expresses was specific to his moment in history. Its intended audience failed to consider its very real implications. That it finds an audience in 1851 America, on the verge of tearing itself apart in the worst crisis of our Republic, the Civil War, speaks to the power of that truth.
Beyond Leutze’s stunning summoning of his talents, his taming of pigment, of light, of composition, his deference to the history of culture that precedes him, it is this truth that hurtles through time, transcending history to speak to us so specifically in this moment and why this painting sprung to my mind to gather all of you and discuss it: As a nation this gift of The Enlightenment, our Democratic Republic is under attack. From outside forces that would see us fail. And their method is to get in our boat and make us fight one another breaking our common purpose. Remember that. These fights are not of our creation. We all still harbor the same goals. And individual freedoms if our nation is to continue mean we must relent to one another, in good faith. Because we are all in the same boat. Let us row. Together.
