The Farewell Table

On 4 December 1783, nine days after the last British troops sailed out of New York, George Washington asked his officers to meet him at noon in the Long Room of Fraunces Tavern on Pearl Street. The war was over and the army all but disbanded. He filled a glass, drank to them, and asked each man to come and take his hand; Henry Knox went first, and by most accounts no one in the room was dry-eyed. Then he walked to the wharf, crossed by barge, and rode to Annapolis to resign his commission.

Leonardo's Last Supper, finished in Milan in 1498, is not a picture of a meal but of a moment: the instant a room hears something it did not expect, and the reaction runs down the table like a wave. He painted it on dry plaster in an experimental mix of oil and tempera, and it began to fail in his own lifetime, which is partly why it looks like the memory of an event.

The room is low and beamed, its three windows full of the masts of the harbor outside. Washington stands at the center in blue and buff, glass raised, his other hand pressed to his chest, his hat on the white cloth before him. The officers turn toward him in clusters: at his left one half rises with an open hand, another buries his face in his palm, and at the far end a man stands. A soldier in a fringed hunting shirt sits among the epaulets. Candles and a map lie on the table.

It is the rarest scene in military history: a commander with an army behind him and no enemy in front, giving the power back.