This is the tale of two famous painting I’ve never seen—Washington Crossing the Delaware and O Grito do Ipiranga.
It’s not for lack of trying.
But first…
As a reporter, I hate cliches but this one fits so closely it’s irresistible. Both paintings are “iconic” in very nearly the defined sense: “A representation of sacred events or, especially, of a sacred individual used as an object of veneration or a tool of instruction (Merriam-Webster).”
The two paintings are related, and in more ways than one.
Washington Crossing the Delaware depicts General George Washington, commander of the rag-tag Continental Army, crossing the Delaware River from Pennsylvania to New Jersey on his way to defeat a cohort of Hessians (mercenaries from the Germanic province of Hesse) at the battle of Trenton during the American Revolution. The crossing took place through the night of December 25-26, 1776.
Iconic, the painting is also ironic. The original was completed in 1850 by a German-American artist named Emanuel Leutze, who later made two copies. Leutze labored on the work in Germany; models for the figures were mostly German studio assistants, although Leutze managed to wrangle a couple of American tourists. The noble German models in the painting depict the Continentals on their way to a famous military victory against…Germans. A further irony is that the original, displayed for years not in the United States but in Bremen, Germany, was destroyed in 1942…by American bombers. Only the two copies, one the same size (12-by-21 feet) as the original and a second, smaller, version, remain. The smaller copy is housed at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum in Winona, Minnesota. The larger copy is what Americans venerate as the iconic portrait of General Washington and his intrepid men, a symbol of dogged American resolve and aspirational nation building.
In Brazil, O Grito do Ipiranga has answered the same call.
Completed in 1888 by Brazilian artist Pedro Américo, O Grito do Ipiranga depicts the moment on September 7, 1822, when Prince Regent Pedro de Bragança e Bourbon cried out, for all his entourage to hear, “The time has come! Independence or death! We are now separated from Portugal!” The date has long been commemorated as Brazilian Independence Day. Roughly translated, O Grito do Ipiranga means “The Cry From the Banks of the Ipiranga River,” although the Ipiranga was, and is, more of a creek than a river. O Grito, like Washington Crossing, is monumental in size—about 13-by-25 feet.
Long Day’s Journey into…Frustration
I first attempted to view O Grito do Ipiranga when I moved to São Paulo, Brazil’s biggest city, in 1983. The painting is the highlight of the Paulista Museum, located on the exact grounds of the Prince Regent’s famous cry for independence. The little Ipiranga creek still gurgles nearby. But my wife and I were told that, alas, the painting was in storage awaiting restoration.
We tried again, through the 80s and 90s, until, in 2013, the entire museum was shut down for restoration…for nine years!
Our latest attempt to view O Grito was on New Year’s Day…but the museum was closed for the holiday.
In the mid-1990s, on a trip to New Jersey to see family, we decided our kids were old enough to take an American heritage tour. Among other points of interest, we visited a place called, appropriately enough, Washington Crossing, Pennsylvania. A guidebook indicated the onsite museum housed Leutze’s famous painting (actually, the artist’s 1851 copy). But, alas, arriving there, we were told Washington Crossing the Delaware had been removed to its permanent home at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
On our next trip to New Jersey, we decided our kids were old enough to appreciate an art museum. And what better place to start than the Met!
As the day arrived, I could barely contain my excitement! A guidebook described Washington Crossing the Delaware as “the centerpiece of the Met’s American Wing.” Like the Maltese Falcon, it was nearly within my grasp! I fairly shivered as Washington and his men picked their way through ice floes to get to the Jersey side of the Delaware.
We paid our tickets. We pushed through the turnstile. I approached a museum guard.
“Which way,” I asked, breathlessly, “To Washington Crossing the Delaware?”
“Oh,” he said, with trademark New York insouciance. “That gallery is closed. Restoration.”
He might as well have said: “Drop dead!”
Art and History Meet…Or do They?
I have waited much of my adult life to see these two paintings.
Why?
It’s not for the artistic experience; nor for the history.
From an artistic viewpoint, there’s not much to see here other than the grand scale and the stoical figures. Washington heroically faces the new nation’s destiny wearing a uniform just back from the dry cleaner’s on the Pennsylvania side; Prince Regent Pedro raises his sword with the doleful scowl of a grand master at a fraternity hazing party.
The most modern critics can muster for O Grito do Ipiranga is “monumental but academic.” Américo, like Leutze, worked abroad, in the case of O Grito, laboring in Florence, Italy, often with local models. He was known for his attention to detail, down to the buttons on the soldiers’ uniforms, but he never wavered from academic norms when it came to composition.
Leutze, for his part, has been described by art critical Robert Hughes as “an important figure in the promotion of (America’s) Manifest Destiny.” But that’s just a way of saying he was something of an official court painter. Hughes’ cutting dictum could be applied to both artists: “Confidence is the prize given to the mediocre.”
As history, both works are trash.
Washington would not have crossed the river in the lifeboat-sized craft, accompanied by a gaggle of panting soldiers, as pictured in Leutze’s grand scene. He would have used a flat-bottomed Durham boat, a type of barge for hauling iron ore. Thirty or forty soldiers would have been with him, all of them, including the Commander-in-Chief, huddled against what one participant called “a storm of wind, rain, hail and snow.” There would have been no light to outline Washington’s heroic profile.
Nor was the battle of Trenton particularly decisive. It led to about a thousand Hessians being sent back to Germany after a brief imprisonment. Trenton itself had little strategic importance. Hours after the engagement, Washington and his troops crossed the Delaware again, this time back to Pennsylvania.
Nor was the Prince Regent’s urgent cry for independence as heroic as depicted by Pedro Américo. For one thing, the prince was riding a mule, not a horse. He, and the men in his entourage, were dressed as tropeiros, rugged pathfinders, not military officers in full-dress uniform. And the Prince Regent was in a singularly foul mood, suffering from diarrhea that forced him to relieve himself in the woods every few miles as he journeyed from the coastal port of Santos to the provincial town of São Paulo. At Ipiranga, just short of his destination, letters reached him outlining new, and intrusive, directives from Lisbon. His initial response might have been more in the line of a string of expletives, followed by the famous “cry.”
In any event, no one at the time took the Prince Regent’s words entirely seriously. He was known to be temperamental. It was only after a meeting of national leaders in Rio de Janeiro on October 12 that Brazil formally declared its independence.
So, what’s the attraction?
If the two paintings lack artistic inspiration and historical accuracy, why bother with them?
The answer is…a century and a half of newspaper journalism! A journalism of the people, by the people, and for the people!
It’s not the history in the works; it’s the history of them.
Each painting has served as rich and boundless fodder for generations of editorial cartoonists. How many newspaper readers have delighted at the profile of Teddy Roosevelt and his Square Deal cohorts “crossing the Delaware” in heroic splendor…or FDR…or JFK, his hair blowing in the wind…or Nixon, with Henry Kissinger batting away the ice floes! In Brazil, how many civilian presidents have raised their swords amid a swarm of loyal, and easily caricatured, aides on horseback…Getúlio Vargas…Kubitschek…Lula!
And many more will similarly ply the frigid waters of the Delaware or brave the muddy Ipiranga; for as long as there are editorial cartoons (still thriving on digital news platforms), these two “iconic” images will serve as perfect templates for drama, irony, and comic relief.
They belong to the people. Therefore, they must be on public display, even when undergoing restauration and surrounded by plexiglass, at all times, ideally at a central and permanent location. The gallery safeguarding them, furthermore, should display no other paintings but, rather, a rotating collection of editorial cartoons from across the decades.
They are iconic for a reason.
In Washington Crossing the Delaware and O Grito do Ipiranga, we see our leaders as we wish to see them; in a thousand editorial cartoons, we see them as they are.
-Thomas Murphy, 2026
Coming Next Month: Last Flight to Casablanca…
Photo Credits: Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museo Paulista; Library of Congress; Paulo Caruso
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