Leutze, Emanuel Gottlieb

Leutze, Emanuel Gottlieb (1816-1868), German-American artist who created one of America's best-known historical paintings, Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Born in Gmünd, Württemberg, Leutze moved to Philadelphia with his parents in 1825. He studied painting, for a brief time under a mentor, but largely on his own. In 1837 he left Philadelphia for commissions in Washington, D.C., and Fredericksburg, Virginia. In 1841, with help from patrons John Minor IV of Fredericksburg and Edward L. Carey of Philadelphia, Leutze sailed for Düsseldorf, Germany, to study at the Academy of Painting before continuing to Italy for three years of study.

He returned to Düsseldorf in 1845, married there, and won several art prizes. In late 1850, while he was engaged on his most ambitious work, Washington Crossing the Delaware, a studio fire damaged the huge painting and Leutze began work on a new canvas. He completed the later canvas first, and it hung in the Kunsthalle Museum in Bremen until it was destroyed by Allied bombing in 1942. The first Washington Crossing the Delaware, completed after the second version in 1851, established Leutze's reputation, and following its immediate purchase Leutze himself transported it to the United States. It is presently on exhibit in the American wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Two of Leutze's most successful portraits were those of American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne and of his friend Abraham Lincoln. Leutze's works Fight at Fayal (1814) and Signing of the Alaska Purchase Treaty (1867) are notable for their accuracy of historical detail. In 1862 he completed his gigantic mural for the United States Capitol, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way. Leutze helped to establish the Washington Art Association and the New York Artists Fund Society.