Commissioned by the state of North Carolina for a public building, this monumental painting commemorates the cold December night when Washington led his troops across the frozen Delaware River to surprise the enemy forces at Trenton. The decisive victory that followed tilted the war in the colonists' favor. Thomas Sully, an ambitious Philadelphia artist, drew from written account of the event and his own theatrical imagination to formulate the painting, which he called "a historical portrait." Measuring a startling twelve feet tall by seventeen feet wide, the painting proved too large for its intended exhibition space and circulated through venues up and down the East Coast until it was acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts in 1903. It retains its original frame, crafted by the Boston artisan John Doggett around 1823.

Sully's image is notable for the way it gestures towards a large set of political questions. The group of men at right includes William Lee, an enslaved man who served as Washington's valet during the war. Peering out from the background, he calls attention to the participation of people of color in the American Revolution and references the broader debates over the existence of slavery in the new nation.

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