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On Christmas Eve 250 years ago, General George Washington conducted the Continental Army’s most memorable sneak attack by crossing the Delaware River during a vicious nor’easter.

Ever since, artists have depicted the historic crossing. That decisive moment of the Revolutionary War is ripe for artistic interpretation.

“We didn’t want to offer a historical perspective on that event,” said Laura Turner Igoe, curator at the Michener Museum of Art in Doylestown. “As an art museum, we thought we could contribute something different to the conversation, looking at how artists, both historic and contemporary, have engaged with that event, tried to depict that event or used the visual language of that event to comment upon our current moment.”

“The Crossing: Picturing the American Revolution” features 21 depictions of the infamous military maneuver, ranging from folk artist Edward Hicks’ 1819 “The Passage of the Delaware” to a 2023 monumental sculpture of toy bricks, “Washington Crossing the Delaware” by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.

Some artists in the exhibition tried to depict the crossing as accurately as possible. Bucks County artist Robert Beck carefully studied the boats, the terrain and the weather of that night in 1776 and came up with “Second Crossing” — a nighttime depiction that communicates blind struggle more than heroism. The canvas is so dark that General Washington is almost impossible to make out.

“This painting is not about patriotic mythology,” Beck said in the museum’s audio guide. “This painting is about what the men faced. It’s about spirit and courage.”

Crossing the Delaware River was a ‘moonshot’

In some ways, the crossing of the Delaware should not have happened.

Washington’s original plan was for himself and two other generals to cross the river simultaneously at three points, then converge on the New Jersey side and surprise Hessian troops in Trenton. But the nor’easter was so bad, and the river so choked with ice, that the other generals determined that crossing with artillery and horses would have been suicide. They refused to cross and assumed Washington had backed off as well.

Philadelphia artist Mark Thomas Gibson called Washington’s crossing a “moonshot.”

“He got lucky,” Gibson said in the exhibition’s audio guide. His 2025 painting “Shipwrecked” suggests what could easily have happened if the crossing took a tragic turn.

“The ‘Shipwrecked’ painting was this idea of: But sometimes you fail,” he said.

The most iconic image of Washington crossing the Delaware is the painting Emanuel Leutze made in 1851, a monumental 12’ x 21’ image of Washington at the head of a small boat as his men paddle through ice floes. It is not at the Michener, having not moved from its home at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in over 60 years.

In its stead, Igoe hung Weiwei’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” a nearly exact replica of Leutze’s painting rendered with an estimated 650,000 toy plastic bricks. Previously exhibited only in commercial galleries and art fairs, the Michener is the first museum to show the 2023 work.

The main difference between Weiwei’s copy and Leutze’s original is the appearance on the opposite shore of the Beijing National Stadium, also known as the “bird’s nest,” for its unique architecture, built for the 2008 Olympic games.

“Ai Weiwei has notoriously been critical of the Chinese government in his work,” Igoe said. “By including that architectural feature, he’s really making this painting more about the global ambitions of the United States, particularly the competition between China and the United States and the perils of that competition.”

How Washington’s crossing is wrapped in myth

Weiwei took artistic liberties with Washington’s crossing for his own purposes, as Leutze did.

In 1851, Leutze was living in Germany and responding to the widespread popular uprisings sweeping across Europe. His “Washington Crossing the Delaware” was not an homage to American history, but a rallying cry for the Revolutions of 1848, which sought to topple European monarchies and led to the unification of Germany and Italy as nation-states.

That Leutze’s river more closely resembles the Rhine in Germany than the Delaware, and that Washington’s top-heavy stance would have capsized the small boat, makes “Washington Crossing the Delaware” more fiction than fact.

“It’s like a fairy tale, but it is an image that upholds a lot of myths about America and the founding of America,” said artist vanessa german. “Who gets to take on American fiction? Who gets to manipulate the story towards a new telling? I do.”

German’s “Miracles and Glory Abound” is a full-gallery installation of Leutze’s boat, made from found materials, placed in the middle of a park, surrounded by onlookers. The fanciful figures include one with a zebra head, which german said is a reference to the Atlantic Middle Passage slave trade. A figure at the bow, holding a tennis racket in lieu of an ice pick, is a reference to Serena Williams. The Washington-esque standing figure represents a single mother holding an infant.

While german does not depict herself in the installation, she said it puts her in control of the American narrative.

“It means something that I’m the artist. It means something that I am a Black woman, that I am queer, that I am fat, that I made it in the hood,” said german, who made the sculpture in 2018, while living in the Homewood area of Pittsburgh.

“Somebody with my identity was never supposed to be free or have resources,” she said. “I am not supposed to have freedom and liberty to decide for myself what my hands, my mind, my imagination is doing.”

“The Crossing: Picturing the American Revolution” will be on view at the Michener Museum of Art in Doylestown through January 10, 2027.