New Michener Exhibit Explores Visual Portrayals Of Washington's Famous Crossing

DOYLESTOWN, PA — In a new exhibit that celebrates the 250th anniversary of George Washington's famous crossing of the Delaware River in 1776, the Michener Art Museum maps the making and unmaking of how the event has been portrayed visually over the years.

"The Crossing: Picturing the American Revolution," on view from Saturday, June 27, through Sunday, January 10, 2027, compares historic perspectives of Washington’s Crossing with responses by national and international contemporary artists.

Among the pieces included in the show is the first museum exhibition of Ai Weiwei’s "Washington Crossing the Delaware," a massive toy brick reproduction of the 21-foot Emmanuel Leutze painting. An immersive installation by vanessa german, "Miracles and Glory Abound," features otherworldly, full-sized figures constructed from found objects.

“At the Michener, we proudly honor the enduring legacy of Washington’s Crossing right here in Bucks County — just steps from where history was made,” Executive Director and CEO Anne Corso said. “The story isn’t what we learned in our textbooks, and who better to guide us through its complexities than artist voices from across our nation’s 250 years.”

Emmanuel Leutze’s heroic painting, "Washington Crossing the Delaware," at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the definitive visual most people associate with the Crossing. However, the mythologized history in what Washington Crossing Historic Park calls the “most prominent and arguably the least accurate depiction of the legendary Christmas night” isn’t the first to sweep popular imagination.

Before Leutze’s 1851 composition, the most recognized depiction of Washington’s Crossing was Thomas Sully’s "The Passage of the Delaware" from 1819.

Michener Art Museum presents two paintings of Washington at the Delaware by Edward Hicks, a Bucks County Quaker minister and sign painter, who famously copied prints of Sully’s work for the local market. The artworks show the popularity of both Sully’s painting and Washington’s Crossing as an artistic subject.

Several works by modern and contemporary artists—including William Francis Taylor, Charles W. Hargens, Mort Künstler, and Robert Beck—reexamine the historical accuracy of Leutze’s painting of Washington Crossing and offer their own more truthful version of the event.

Ai Weiwei (b. 1957), Washington Crossing the Delaware, 2023. Toy bricks, 267 ¾ × 157 ½ inches. Installation view, Faurschou New York. Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio.

Washington appears as a dark shadow dwarfed by a wide, ice-filled river in Pennsylvania Impressionist William Francis Taylor’s scene from 1937, painted after the New Hope artist “decided that all the known paintings of General Washington’s crossing of the Delaware were inspiring but not the least bit realistic.”

The contemporary Bucks County artist Robert Beck also studied the recorded conditions of Washington’s Crossing, and even sat in a Durham Boat, to execute his 1999 painting "Second Crossing."

Other contemporary artists featured in the exhibition consider the peoples, perspectives, and histories that are not represented within Leutze’s composition to comment on American history and current events more broadly.

Sculptor and painter vanessa german injects the iconic visualization of Washington crossing the Delaware into a large-scale, multimedia piece that celebrates Black womanhood. "Miracles and Glory Abound," last shown publicly in 2023, populates the historical narrative with new characters to invite conversation about public memory and the mythologization of history.

Philadelphia’s Mark Thomas Gibson references Washington’s Crossing’s legacy in history painting with works like "Return on a Homeward Tide" and "Shipwreck," that comment on a polarized United States.

Gibson’s "Weathering the Storm" captures the forward momentum and heroic drive in Washington Crossing the Delaware, and applies it within a contemporary scene of protest.

Sketches and studies by Kent Monkman, a Cree First Nations painter, portray the relationship of Indigenous peoples with newcomers to their lands with imagery inspired by Leutze’s work.

Ai Weiwei utilizes the global recognition of Washington Crossing the Delaware in his 2023 toy brick interpretation that sets Beijing’s National Stadium in the background. Weiwei co-designed the building for the 2008 Olympics, only to be disappointed in its use as propaganda by the Chinese government, and the adaptation allows for a critique on cultural myths and fraught U.S. and Chinese relations.

“The contemporary work included in 'The Crossing' memorializes and responds to the past and also elicits dialogue and imagines new futures for the United States, much like paintings by Emanuel Leutze and Thomas Sully did at the time of their creation,” said Laura Turner Igoe, Gerry and Marguerite Lenfest Chief Curator. “These artists encourage us to tell our own stories on a monumental scale.”

"The Crossing: Picturing the American Revolution" is presented through the generosity of the Philadelphia Funder Collaborative for the Semiquincentennial, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Gorsky Family, and Alan and Penny Griffith, with major support from the Bucks County Tourism Grant Program, and additional support from Eiseman Exterior Renovations, Fernberger Wealth Management of Raymond James, and mini-grant from Bucks250PA.