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The Passage of the Delaware

Thomas Sully (American (born in England), 1783–1872)
1819

Medium/Technique Oil on canvas
Dimensions 372.11 x 525.78 cm (146 1/2 x 207 in.)
Credit Line Gift of the Owners of the old Boston Museum
Accession Number03.1079
CollectionsAmericas
ClassificationsPaintings
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.

InscriptionsLower right, on coat hem of soldier mounting horse: TS. F[e]ct. 1819. [TS in monogram]
Provenance1817, commissioned by the State of North Carolina; 1819, commission rescinded [see note 1]; 1823, sold by the artist to John Doggett (dealer, b. 1780 – d. 1857), Doggett’s Repository of Arts, Boston [see note 2]; 1823, sold by John Doggett to Ethan Allen Greenwood (b. 1779 – d. 1856) for the New England Museum, Boston [see note 3]; 1839, New England Museum closed and contents sold to Moses Kimball (b. 1809 – d. 1895), Boston, for the Boston Museum and Gallery of Fine Arts [see note 4]; 1903, gift of the owners of the Boston Museum to the MFA. (Accession Date: May 26, 1903)

NOTES:
[1] In December 1819, the State of North Carolina rescinded the commission because the painting was too large for its intended location, a condition which Sully agreed to in January 1820. See Philipp P. Fehl, “Thomas Sully’s Washington’s Passage of the Delaware: The History of a Commission”, The Art Bulletin, vol. 55, 1973, pp. 524-587.

[2] From April to June, the painting was on view at Doggett’s Repository of Arts. See Richard Nylander, “Framing the Interior: The Entrepreneurial Career of John Doggett,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, vol. 88, Boston Furniture, 1700-1900 (Boston, 2016), and John Clubbe, “Byron, Sully, & the Power of Portraiture,” (Ashgate Publishing, June 2005), pp. 99-100.

[3] Greenwood recorded on July 4, 1823: “Bought the celebrated large picture ‘Passage of the Delaware’ for $510.” See Georgia Brady Barnhill, “‘Extracts from the Journals of Ethan A. Greenwood’: Portrait Painted and Museum Proprietor,” American Antiquarian Society, 1993, p. 160, notes 152-153. Greenwood founded the New England Museum in 1818, which absorbed the Old Boston Museum in 1822, the collections of the Linnaean Society in 1822, and the Columbian Museum in 1825. From “‘Extracts from the Journals of Ethan A. Greenwood’: Portrait Painted and Museum Proprietor,” edited by Georgia Brady Barnhill, American Antiquarian Society (1993). For more information, see Walter K. Watkins, “The New England Museum and the Home of Art in Boston,” The Bostonian Society Publications, vol. 2 (Boston, 1918).

[4] In 1839, after the New England Museum closed, Greenwood and his assignees sold the collection to Moses Kimball, who in 1841 established the Boston Museum and Gallery of Fine Arts. The Boston Museum was a theater, art museum, and natural history museum located at 18 Tremont Street. See Watkins, 1918 (as above, note 3).