(gentle music)
- [Beth] We're standing
in a lovely skylit room
in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
looking at a very famous painting,
but we're actually gonna try
a different method today.
We're gonna not talk about our assumptions
about what we're seeing,
but we're gonna take the
time to look closely.
- [Steven] We're standing
with Sarah Alvarez,
who's Director of School Programs
at the Art Institute of Chicago.
She's gonna help us with this process.
- [Sarah] I'd like for us to
talk about some of the things
that caught our attention
when we first looked at this.
It might be a feeling we had.
It might be a particular
detail in the painting.
- [Beth] Well, given that
it's a cold January day,
I immediately empathized with
the very cold, windy weather.
- [Steven] What strikes me first
is just the sheer size of this canvas.
This was painted with a paintbrush.
It must have taken forever.
- [Sarah] We might want
to take your observation
and pose it as a question to ourselves:
How was this made?
What were the materials that were used?
How long did it take?
Those are all questions that
we can continue to explore,
and we should make an inventory
as we're talking about
some of those things
we're wondering about.
- [Steven] And asking those questions
prompted me to ask another question,
which is why it's so big.
This could never fit in my house.
Where was this intended to be?
- [Sarah] We see a large number of figures
packed into boats.
Based on the way that they're all faced
and other actions that
we can see them making,
they all seem to be moving
in the same direction
across a body of water.
There's a tall figure in the
boat that's in the foreground
that is very determined-looking.
Is the leader, is he the most important,
and how is he related to
all of these other figures?
- [Beth] I also notice that
the figures seem wrapped up
in their own worlds.
- [Steven] I'm noticing
how distinct each one is
from the other.
They're wearing different clothing.
They're not only in their own worlds,
but they seem to come
out of different worlds.
- [Sarah] And I'm wondering,
where is this frozen, cold place?
There's these cloudy skies.
Maybe that's a star, maybe that's the sun,
that is poking through the clouds.
- [Steven] I'm struck
that the standing figure
and the figure holding the
flag seem immune to that cold.
They seem so focused, so
determined, so resolute,
looking towards that far shore,
the cold seems to pass over them.
- [Beth] There is also a
sense of chaos around them.
- [Steven] It is really interesting
how there is simultaneously
both a frenetic energy
and a sense of stillness and quiet.
My eye keeps going back
to that central figure.
That's the only face that's not obscured
that's in profile,
and it's illuminated by the sky behind it.
- [Beth] And around him are
all of these diagonal lines,
and all of those diagonal
lines point to the right,
and yet we know the boat
is moving to the left.
- [Steven] And at the same time,
those oars and that
flagpole mark a kind of area
that that central figure can inhabit
and emphasize his importance even more.
- [Sarah] One question is,
are there other images in our mind,
in our visual reference bank,
that tell us that this is
a person of importance?
- [Beth] He looks like a
profile of a figure on a coin.
- [Steven] And the lighting
reminds me of religious images.
It reminds me of images
where biblical events were unfolding.
- [Sarah] We've talked
a lot about the choices
the artist has made to
position the figures, the boat,
the land, but there are some other
even more fundamental
characteristics of this painting,
like the colors and the brushstrokes
that might be helpful for us to explore
in order to generate some
additional questions.
- [Steven] The things that
are part of the natural world
are cool, blues and whites
and greens, and the boat,
the things that are manmade
and the people and their clothing,
tend to be warmer colors.
- [Sarah] It's almost
as if there are layers
of different kinds of tension
that the artist has chosen
to use in this painting.
- [Beth] This event is
unfolding before us.
Everyone except for that central figure
is in the middle of moving.
- [Sarah] If you look very closely,
every single line and
brushstroke is so precise,
and they feel so still;
yet there's so much animation
to a lot of the details,
again, another point of tension.
- [Beth] And it's like the artist wants us
to notice those little details to the bag.
It looks like a bag that
I've seen in galleries
of Native American art, or the fur caps,
these details of clothing
that seem to differentiate the figures
and draw us in to look at them.
- [Steven] It is remarkable
how long this painting
holds my attention.
It does make me wonder
whether or not it was designed
to make a large, powerful
impact initially,
but then to draw me in
to these little details.
- [Sarah] Let's gather
together the questions
that we've posed.
We've asked about the artist's intentions,
the choices that the artist made,
whether it be in the
scale of the painting,
the composition.
We've asked a lot of questions
about what's happening here,
who is meant to see this,
where was it meant to go?
We have a lot of questions
about the making of the painting
and the initial reception of the painting.
We might also ask questions
about when it was made,
and how people have thought about it
or experienced it since then.
One of the important steps in our process
is to think about what sources we use.
We have documentation
from the popular press
that tells us about how
people were engaging
with the painting, what
they saw, what they thought.
We also have other kinds
of materials, like prints,
or keepsakes that were
produced in vast quantities
and distributed all over the country.
All of these primary sources
give us further information
about this moment in time and
the meaning of this painting.
Let's just simply start
with the title and date.
- [Beth] "Washington
Crossing the Delaware."
It's so tempting to say this was 1776,
which is the date of the
Declaration of Independence
and the year that Washington
crossed the Delware,
but this was actually made 75 years later.
- [Sarah] And what do we
know about the subject?
- [Beth] Well, we know that this was
an important turning
point in the Revolution,
that Washington and his troops had lost
several major battles to the British,
the troops were disheartened,
they were tired,
there was a sense of hopelessness,
and that this battle,
and the victory that followed,
changed the outlook of the revolutionaries
and gave them hope for the future.
- [Steven] Washington's troops
were crossing the Delaware
in order to mount a sneak attack
in the middle of the night
against Hessian soldiers fighting
on behalf of the British,
that is, Germans.
And Leutze had been born in Germany.
He had grown up in the United States,
but he had gone back,
and he painted this in
the German city of Dusseldorf.
- [Sarah] So what was happening in 1851
that might help us understand
why Leutze decided to portray
this subject at this time?
- [Beth] We know that there
was series of revolutions
in Europe in 1848.
There was a desire to
overturn an old order
of kinds and emperors
and create a new order
where people had more
say in their government.
- [Sarah] And all of the different places
where revolutions were
happening essentially failed.
There were many different
groups of revolutionaries
who could not unify to
succeed in their efforts.
And we know that Emmanuel
Leutze was sympathetic
to this revolutionary cause,
and a painting like
this would provide hope.
- [Beth] We have George
Washington leading the troops.
But the time the artist has spent
on all the other individual figures
and their clear differences
makes me think about how
revolutions are made up of
people of different
backgrounds coming together
to fight for a single cause.
- [Sarah] And it also suggests
that a revolution is tenuous,
that the success of the
revolution is contingent upon
the unity of diverse voices.
This is the 50th anniversary of the death
of George Washington, in 1851.
People are celebrating
him as the great unifier
of this young nation.
There's also a moment in the
United States at this time
that even though unity exists,
there's still a fractured nation.
There's sectionalism,
especially around the issue of slavery,
and an image like this suggests
that unity is possible.
- [Steven] And the reports
are that the crowds
are enormous, that people
flocked to see this painting.
- [Beth] It offered them an image of unity
in the face of incredible sectionalism
in the United States in the 1850s.
- [Sarah] And in December 12th of 1851,
a notice in the New York Daily Times
said that over 20,000 people
had visited the exhibition.
Quote, "The sight of such
a splendid work of art
"will do more for the
union of this country
"than a thousand union speeches."
And another notice in the
Albion said that quote,
"We defy anyone possessed
of one grain of sensibility
"to look upon it, unmoved,"
referencing the emotional
power of this painting.
- [Beth] For Americans
in the mid-19th century,
Washington himself, but
also the Revolutionary War,
was this defining moment
of American character,
that we together defeated the British.
- [Sarah] Artists like Robert
Colescott, Jacob Lawrence,
and others have reproduced this image
and told very different
stories of American history.
- [Steven] And that's a
reminder that a work of art
is always a product of its own time
and is itself a primary source.
- [Sarah] And works of art do
something really wonderful,
which is that they play on our emotions,
they pull at our senses, and
they captivate us in a way
that drives our sense of curiosity
and gets us to ask questions
that allow us to approach history
in deeper and richer ways.
(gentle music)
