Instead of a rowboat, the troops probably boarded a flat-bottomed ferry big and stable enough to carry cannons, plus the horses to pull them, Kunstler said. Such boats were hitched to cables to stabilize them.
BY VERENA DOBNIK | THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW YORK — One of America’s most famous images, a painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware River, got much of the story wrong: The American commander wouldn’t have stood triumphantly on a rowboat in daylight, but on a ferry bracing himself against a fierce snowstorm on Christmas night.
That’s the historic scene depicted in a new painting on display at the New-York Historical Society museum in Manhattan.
“No one in his right mind would have stood up in a rowboat in that weather,” artist Mort Kunstler said. “It would have capsized.”
He told The Associated Press he’s “not knocking the original” — the well-known 1851 painting by German-born artist Emanuel Leutze, who Kunstler says “was glorifying Washington using what he knew at the time.” But Kunstler said his new piece is aimed at righting the historical mistakes.
Washington and his troops crossed the Delaware from Pennsylvania to New Jersey to mount a surprise attack on Hessian forces at the Battle of Trenton on Dec. 26, 1776. The Americans killed 22 Hessians, wounded 98 and captured nearly 900 while losing only three of their own men.
Relying on military experts and historians, plus visits to the river site, Kunstler came up with a list of inaccuracies in Leutze’s painting and set out to correct them in his new work, “Washington’s Crossing: McKonkey’s Ferry, Dec. 26, 1776.”
The most obvious is Washington would not have used the earliest stars-and-stripes flag that appears in the Leutze work; it wasn’t adopted until 1777.
Instead of a rowboat, the troops probably boarded a flat-bottomed ferry big and stable enough to carry cannons, plus the horses to pull them, Kunstler said. Such boats were hitched to cables to stabilize them.