Artist

Emanuel Leutze — the German painter who pictured America

1816, Schwäbisch Gmünd — 1868, Washington, D.C.

Düsseldorf School, history painting

Timeline

1816

Born in Schwäbisch Gmünd on May 24

1825

His family emigrates to the United States

1841

Arrives at the Düsseldorf Academy

1848

Backs the revolution, cofounds the Malkasten

1851

Washington Crossing the Delaware shown in New York

1862

Completes the Capitol mural

1868

Dies in Washington on July 18

On the west staircase of the House wing of the U.S. Capitol, a mural twenty feet high and thirty feet wide shows a column of pioneers reaching the crest of the Rockies. The covered wagons halt, a man raises his arm toward the horizon, a mother holds her baby close. At the very bottom, like a promise, lies San Francisco Bay.

The same painter created the most famous image of the Revolutionary War: George Washington standing in a boat among the ice floes of the Delaware. Few artists have done more to shape how Americans picture their own history.

Yet Emanuel Leutze was born in Germany and spent nearly twenty years in Düsseldorf. His whole career played out between two countries, two traditions and two revolutions: the one America had won, and the one Germany failed to carry through in 1848.

From Swabia to Philadelphia

Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze was born on May 24, 1816, in Schwäbisch Gmünd, in the Kingdom of Württemberg. According to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, his parents were political refugees. In 1825 the family emigrated to the United States and eventually settled in Philadelphia, where his father worked as a merchant. He died while Emanuel was still a teenager.

The boy drew to earn a living. He took lessons from the English-born painter John Rubens Smith, and in 1837 he was working as an itinerant portraitist in Washington, D.C., in search of sitters. The commissions that followed his first history paintings paid for his passage to Europe.

Düsseldorf, a school for Americans

In the spring of 1841 Leutze arrived in Düsseldorf. The city’s Academy, directed by Wilhelm von Schadow, was then one of Europe’s great centers of history painting. He studied under Schadow, but the painter who shaped him most was Karl Friedrich Lessing, who came to advise him in his own studio.

His first major canvas, Columbus before the Council of Salamanca, was bought by Düsseldorf’s art association. Leutze then moved on to Munich and to Italy, studying Titian and Michelangelo in Venice and Rome. Back in 1845, he married Juliane Lottner, the daughter of a Prussian officer, and settled in Düsseldorf for nearly fifteen years.

His studio became an essential stop for young American painters training in Germany. He welcomed them and advised them. A drawing at the National Gallery of Art preserves a trace of that circle: Leutze sketched his fellow American Eastman Johnson in the act of drawing. Worthington Whittredge and Albert Bierstadt also passed through Düsseldorf in those years.

1848: art and liberty

Leutze was no court painter. When revolution swept across Europe in 1848, he supported the German liberal uprising against the princes. That same year he was one of the founders of the Malkasten, a Düsseldorf artists’ association that still exists. In 1857 he helped convene, in Bingen, the first general assembly of German artists.

His subjects from these years, from John Knox to Oliver Cromwell, revolve around freedom of conscience and resistance to tyranny. Yet the most ambitious of them is a picture of conquest: The Storming of the Teocalli by Cortez and His Troops, completed in 1848 for a Boston patron, Amos Binney, and now at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut.

More than seven feet high and eight feet wide, the canvas shows the summit of a pyramid in Tenochtitlan under assault. Armored conquistadors and Aztec defenders clash there in a furious melee, at the height of the fighting. Leutze closely followed the American historian William H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico, published in 1843, and borrowed his settings from Frederick Catherwood’s lithographs of Maya ruins.

Shown in New York in 1849, the painting landed in the middle of current events: the United States had just come out of its war with Mexico, and many viewers read it as a comment on the conflict. Whose side is the painter on, the armored horsemen’s or that of a people defending itself to the last? The question has never been settled, and the exhibition “The West as America,” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 1991, reopened it.

When the German revolution failed, Leutze turned his gaze to the country that, in his eyes, had succeeded in its own. It was in that climate, in the late 1840s, that he began a picture of America in 1776.

Two hours standing in for Washington

In 1849 a young landscape painter from Ohio, Worthington Whittredge, arrived in Düsseldorf and knocked on Leutze’s door. He left a vivid account of what followed in his memoirs, completed in 1905. One evening Leutze showed him a small pencil sketch made the night before: a boat, soldiers, a general standing. The next day a huge canvas was ordered.

The problem was models. German sitters, Whittredge recalled, were either too small or too stocky to pass for Americans. So Leutze “caught every American that came along and pressed him into his service.” A tall Cincinnatian, John Groesbeck, found himself in the boat almost before he could ask how Whittredge was getting along; a sickly friend of Whittredge’s, his head bandaged, played a wounded man.

Whittredge himself posed for the steersman, then for Washington. Dressed in an exact copy of the uniform, a spyglass in one hand, he stood two hours without moving so that Leutze could paint the folds of the cloak in one go. Afterward, he wrote, “they poured champagne down my throat and I lived through it.” The sky, finally, had to be covered in a single day so the colors would blend: Leutze called in Whittredge and the landscape painter Andreas Achenbach, who added the last, almost invisible star above the ice.

The rest is well known: a fire damaged that first version, and a second one sailed for New York in 1851 and triumphed. Leutze followed it, showed it in the Capitol Rotunda in 1852, and asked Congress to entrust him with large murals. The answer would take almost a decade.

A mural for the Capitol

In 1859 Leutze settled in the United States for good, dividing his time between New York and Washington. In July 1861 Captain Montgomery C. Meigs, who oversaw the extension of the Capitol, commissioned a mural for the west staircase of the House wing, for $20,000.

The Civil War had just begun. Leutze nonetheless headed west, to the Colorado region, to sketch the Rocky Mountains. Back in Washington, he painted without interruption from July 1861 to November 1862, using a technique developed in Germany called stereochromy: pigments are applied to the plaster and then sealed with waterglass, which protects them and heightens their color.

The title, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, comes from a poem by the Irish philosopher George Berkeley. At the center, an emigrant family recalls the Holy Family; in the borders, scenes of exploration and two portraits, of the explorer William Clark and the frontiersman Daniel Boone.

The Architect of the Capitol points to one decisive addition. The two preparatory oil sketches, including the one at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, include no Black figure. In the finished mural, Leutze placed a freed African American youth in the foreground, just as slavery was being abolished in the District of Columbia and Lincoln was preparing the Emancipation Proclamation.

The final years

Back in America, Leutze also painted portraits of prominent figures, such as Chief Justice Roger B. Taney in 1859 and the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1862, as well as scenes of the Civil War. In 1863–64 he made a brief trip to Düsseldorf to bring his family to the United States.

He then took up a second ambitious project, devoted to the emancipation of the slaves. He never finished it. On July 18, 1868, during a heat wave, he died in Washington of a stroke, aged fifty-two. He is buried in Glenwood Cemetery.

Leutze’s legacy

History painting, with its grand heroic staging, fell out of fashion in the late nineteenth century, and Leutze’s reputation fell with it. Critics long found his work theatrical, crowded, too sure of its symbols.

His images never went away. Washington Crossing the Delaware remains one of the most reproduced pictures in American history, and the Capitol mural, conserved in 1998–99, still greets visitors to Congress. The 1861 study, much smaller, lets you see the composition up close and follow the painter’s thinking.

Above all, this Swabian-born American fixed an idea in paint: a nation on the move, united in hardship, facing the future. It is a partial vision, one that leaves out the peoples the westward expansion drove from their land. But it says a great deal about what nineteenth-century America wanted to believe about itself.

Where to see Emanuel Leutze’s work

À New York

The Metropolitan Museum of Art displays Washington Crossing the Delaware in the American Wing, Gallery 760, in the gilded frame rebuilt from an 1864 photograph.

À Washington

The mural Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way is in the U.S. Capitol, on the west staircase of the House wing; access depends on the tours and permissions currently in effect. The Smithsonian American Art Museum holds the 1861 oil study, and the National Gallery of Art a group of Leutze drawings, including studies for Washington Crossing the Delaware.

In Germany

The Bremen version was lost in 1942, but Düsseldorf keeps Leutze’s memory alive through the Malkasten, the artists’ association he helped found.