The Continental Table

Benedict Arnold came to Valley Forge in May 1778 on a leg the Saratoga surgeons had wanted to take off. He had been the army's boldest field commander: the march through the Maine wilderness to Quebec, the gunboat fight on Lake Champlain, the charge at Saratoga that broke Burgoyne's line. On 30 May, with the other general officers in camp, he signed an oath of allegiance to the United States, and within weeks Washington, who rated him as highly as any officer he had, gave him command of Philadelphia. Two years later Arnold agreed to hand West Point to the British, for a general's commission and more than six thousand pounds.

Leonardo's Last Supper, finished on the refectory wall of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan around 1498, catches the moment after the words "one of you will betray me." The apostles break into groups of three, and Judas, the only one who leans back into shadow, clutches the purse that paid him and knocks over the salt.

Here the room is a winter headquarters, its three windows looking out on snow, smoking log huts and a flag on the ridge. Washington stands at the center in blue and buff, both hands flat on the cloth. The officers break into groups around him: riflemen in fringed hunting shirts at the far left, a heavy officer with a star on his breast of the kind Steuben wore, a young officer in white turning with an open hand. In Judas's seat, at Washington's right, a general in blue looks down at the purse in his fist, a tin cup tipped over and salt spilled beside it. A map, a hat and a sword lie at the other end of the table.

Nobody at the table knows yet. The painting does.