The Storm on the Delaware

By Christmas 1776 the army had been driven the length of New Jersey, enlistments were expiring at the New Year, and Washington had some 2,400 men fit to cross. On the night of 25 December, in a northeaster of sleet and snow, Durham boats and ferries carried them over the ice-choked Delaware at McConkey's Ferry. The crossing ran three hours late and the two supporting columns never got over at all. The army marched nine miles through the dark and struck the Hessian garrison at Trenton after eight that morning, taking nearly nine hundred prisoners.

Rembrandt painted The Storm on the Sea of Galilee in 1633, his only seascape. It hung in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston until 1990, when it was stolen, and its frame still hangs empty there. The boat climbs a wave on a steep diagonal, a break in the cloud throws light on the straining sail and a handful of faces, and everything else is left to the dark.

The boat rises out of the lower right on Rembrandt's diagonal, bow toward the light. A man in the bow braces a long pole against the ice, another leans into an oar, and the rowers along the near gunwale are hunched over their work. Washington stands right of center in a dark cape over buff and blue, looking ahead into the weather, a furled flag behind his shoulder. Ice piles up in the foreground, sleet streaks everything, and the only light comes from a torn cloud at the upper left.

Leutze gave the crossing a sunrise and a standing hero. Rembrandt's weather is closer to the truth, and the man in the cape is still standing.