Lafayette and Washington at Valley Forge

Lafayette spent the worst of the Valley Forge winter in camp. Years later he remembered soldiers without coats, hats, shirts or shoes, their feet and legs turned black by frost, some of them losing limbs to the surgeon's saw.

He was twenty and commanded a division, and he spent his own money on uniforms and muskets for his men. Washington noticed. That winter, when officers and congressmen worked to undermine the commander in chief in the intrigue later called the Conway Cabal, Lafayette would have no part of it. Even when Congress offered him an independent command to invade Canada, he insisted his orders come through Washington.

The two had met only that summer. By the spring of 1778 the young Frenchman regarded Washington as something close to a father, and the friendship held for the rest of Washington's life.

The painting walks them down a muddy, snow-patched lane side by side, both wrapped in long dark cloaks, Washington in his cocked hat and Lafayette bareheaded and turned toward him in conversation. Men sit hunched by small fires on either side in brown, patched clothing, and in the left foreground a soldier binds his foot in rags. Log huts with snowy roofs and smoking chimneys line the right, and a torn flag hangs against a freezing sky.