Leutze, Emanuel Gottlieb b. May 24, 1816; Schwabisch-Gmund, Wurttemberg d.July 18, 1868;Washington, D.C.
German American painter who produced the famous painting Washington Crossing the Delaware. In 1825 Leutze’s parents decided to leave Wurttemberg for the United States to avoid political persecution.
The family settled in Philadelphia. After his father died in 1831, Leutze provided for the family by producing paintings. Interested in the arts, he enrolled in John Rubens Smith’s art classes in 1834. Two years later, he received his first serious commission. He was to paint portraits of famous figures for publication in Longacre and Herring’s National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans. When this project failed, Leutze sustained himself as an itinerant portrait painter and was very welcome in the homes of the Fredericksburg area of Virginia.Supported by generous patrons, he went back to Europe in 1841 to study art. After a short stay in Amsterdam, he enrolled in the Dusseldorf Academy, at this time the most famous European school of art, to develop his painting skills. Christopher Columbus was the topic of his first painting in Dusseldorf. This painting depicted Columbus before the High Council of Salamanca and bore that title. A second painting showed Columbus returning in chains to Cadiz. In 1842 Leutze broke with tradition by opening an art studio rather than remaining at the academy as an apprentice for seven years. He avoided open conflict by leaving the city to travel for a few years. His journey took him to Munich and Italy. By 1845 Leutze was back in Dusseldorf, where he married Juliane Lottner, the daughter of a military officer, and continued his career as an independent artist. In spite of his fondness for life in Germany, Leutze thought of himself as an American artist who lived abroad. He considered himself a temporary resident who produced paintings for the American market. Not without reason, Leutze hoped for recognition in his home country—the United States.
Both the Apollo Association and the American Art Union displayed and praised his paintings. However, he also gained a reputation among his German colleagues, who saw in him a leader of the nonacademic artists’ community. Upon his return from Italy, Leutze was elected president of the Union of Dusseldorf Artists for Mutual Aid and Support.Over the years, Leutze produced several paintings focusing on great men and women in history. He painted Oliver Cromwell and his Daughter (1842—1843), Elizabeth and Raleigh (1845), John Knox and Mary Queen of Scots (1845), The Mission of the Jews to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella (1846), and The Festive Reception of Columbus after his First Discovery of America (circa 1847—1848). All of these themes had been painted before. Leutze was in desperate need of a new and unique topic. He wanted to produce a series of pictures about the American struggle for freedom and civil liberties, in which the New World would occupy a prominent role as the perceived land of unlimited freedom and spiritual rebirth. In 1849 Leutze began work on his most famous painting Washington Crossing the Delaware. It was nearly finished in November 1850, when a fire broke out in his art studio and destroyed parts of this painting. After repairs it was exhibited in Dusseldorf, Cologne, Berlin, and in the Bremer Kunsthalle. The Allied bombings of Bremen during World War II
Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851 painting by Emanuel Leutze. (Bettmann/Corbis)
destroyed the gallery and Leutze’s painting. However, it was not lost because Leutze had produced a copy of it immediately after the destruction of his studio. This second Washington Crossing the Delaware was sent to the United States and displayed in New York and Washington before the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased it.
Leutze was not the first to produce a painting that dealt with the prelude to George Washington’s attack on the British in 1776.
In contrast to prior artists, Leutze, however, portrayed the actual crossing of the Delaware. It is not clear whether Leutze painted this picture for an American or German audience. After the failed revolution of 1848-1849, Leutze showed his fellow German liberals that it was possible to overcome a situation in which the enemies seemed to have all the advantages. The crossing of the Delaware offered hope to the beaten and humiliated German revolutionaries. In the United States, audiences celebrated this naturalistic, although in some respects, historically inaccurate, portrayal of the American struggle for independence from Great Britain.After a short stay in the United States in 1852, Leutze returned to Dusseldorf and continued producing paintings about George Washington (Washington at Dorchester Heights, Washington as the Young Surveyor). Leutze thus participated and profited from the ensuing heroization of Washington throughout the nineteenth century. In 1854 he finished his painting Washington Rallying the Troops at Monmouth. In contrast to the very positive reception of his Washington Crossing the Delaware, art critics and art journals denounced this new painting. An influential art journal, The Crayon, commented that “an incident like this is not in the slightest degree heroic, and not calculated by its commemoration to elevate the character of its hero in the minds of his countrymen; it is therefore not a subject which ought to be chosen for a picture” (Groseclose 1975, 45—46). However, American critics missed the point. They overlooked Leutze’s depiction of Washington’s zeal and courage that induced his soldiers to reestablish order and discipline. It was another reflection of Germany’s political conditions in the 1850s. In the words of art historian Barbara S. Groseclose: “If Washington Crossing the Delaware is a metaphor of encouragement to the politically despondent, Washington Rallying the Troops at Monmouth is a stimulus to action to reassembling scattered forces and renewing the fight” (Groseclose 1975, 46).
The fight, however, was not the American Revolution but the fight for political freedoms in Germany.During the following years, Leutze produced several portraits (Ferdinand Lot- tner, 1852; Worthington Whittredge, 1856). He was respected by German colleagues and mentored several American artists (William Morris Hunt, Worthington Whittredge, George Hall, Eastman Johnson, and Albert Bierstadt, among others) who moved to Dusseldorf because they were attracted by Leutze’s fame. Political and economic pressures forced him to return to the United States in late 1858. He arrived at Boston in January 1859, hoping he would be commissioned to paint a mural of Washington Crossing the Delaware and Washington Rallying the Troops at Monmouth in the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. This idea originally went back to a petition submitted by Leutze to Congress during his short American visit in 1852. Although invited to Washington, D.C., Leutze did not receive any news about this project over the next two years. Meanwhile, he was fully occupied with private commissions (The Founding of Maryland for C. M. Connelly of New York). In summer 1861, Leutze received a government contract for a painting to be titled Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (popularly known as Westward Ho!). After an excursion into the Rocky Mountains, Leutze painted the mural directly upon the wall of the great stairway in the House of Representatives. When the project was completed, Leutze returned to Dusseldorf to bring his family to the United States. They settled first in New York then in Washington, D.C., where Leutze continued to paint.
Thomas Adam
References and Further Reading
Goldstein, Ernest. Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware. New York: Garrard, 1983.
Groseclose, Barbara S. Emanuel Leutze, 1816—1868: Freedom Is the Only King. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1975.
Stehle, Raymond L. The Life and Works of Emanuel Leutze. Washington, DC, 1972.