The Oath at Valley Forge

On 3 February 1778 Congress ordered every officer of the Continental Army to swear a new oath: to renounce George III by name and to pledge himself to the United States of America. The forms reached Valley Forge that spring, at the end of a winter that had cost the army roughly two thousand men to cold, hunger and disease. Washington signed his own oath on 12 May 1778, and through May the officers took theirs in turn, a few days after the camp had paraded to celebrate the alliance with France.

Jacques-Louis David painted the Oath of the Horatii in Rome in 1784 and showed it at the Paris Salon the following year; it hangs in the Louvre. Three brothers stretch their arms toward the swords their father holds up, swearing to fight for Rome, while the women of the house collapse in grief at the right. Its severity, three arches, one light source, no ornament, made it the founding picture of Neoclassicism.

Here the three arches are gray stone and the light falls from the upper left across a flagged floor. Three young officers in blue and buff stand shoulder to shoulder, heads bowed, right hands on their hearts, hats under their arms. Washington faces them at the center, three bare blades raised in his left hand, his right lifted as if administering the words. At the right two women and a boy sit close on a bench, eyes down, the boy holding a fife across his knees. The blades are the brightest thing in the picture.

David built this arrangement to show what resolve costs, and who pays. Transposed to Valley Forge, it says the same thing in an American uniform.