We crossed the River at McKonkey's Ferry 9 miles above Trenton ... the night was excessively severe ... which the men bore without the least murmur...-Tench Tilghman, 27 December 1776/Struggle Series - No. 10: Washington Crossing the Delaware

Jacob Lawrence American

On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 757

For this unconventional retelling of the iconic story of George Washington crossing the Delaware River, Lawrence relied on the firsthand recorded observations of General Washington’s military aide, Tench Tilghman, to depict the precarious experience of the men who made the crossing on the night of December 25, 1776. Their surprise attack on Hessian forces in Trenton, New Jersey led to a turning point in the American Revolution. Lawrence reinvented the canonic scene as three densely packed small boats, tossed by choppy winter waters. Fused in interlocking planes, the heavily cloaked, almost indecipherable figures appear frozen in an agitated state. By privileging unknown men, Lawrence creates a stark contrast to the popular narrative celebrating the hero-genius Washington, immortalized in Emanuel Leutze’s 1851 epic canvas in The Met collection—a painting that Lawrence likely knew well and held in the back of his mind as a foil as he rendered his own interpretation.

We Crossed the River... belongs to a series the artist produced from 1954 to 1956 called Struggle: From the History of the American People. Lawrence originally conceived this series as sixty 12-by-16-inch tempera paintings, spanning subjects from European colonization to World War I. It was intended to depict, in the artist's words, "the struggles of a people to create a nation and their attempt to build a democracy." In the end, he completed thirty panels representing historical moments from 1775 through 1817—from Patrick Henry's legendary "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death" speech to the early years of westward expansion.

Lawrence painted the series at the height of the Cold War and Joseph McCarthy's Red Scare, which also coincided with landmark Civil Rights events, such as the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling that called for the desegregation of public schools. These contemporary struggles deeply informed the artist's approach to and selection of his historical subjects. In his ambitious portrayal of these episodes as inherently contested and diverse, Lawrence foregrounds the experiences of women and people of color. Most panels are, like The Met’s, accompanied by quotations from historical texts. Lawrence's prescient visual reckoning with American history remains profoundly resonant with ongoing issues of racial justice and national identity.

Against the wishes of Lawrence and his dealer, Charles Alan, the Struggle panels were not kept together by the first owner of the series and began changing hands after 1959. As a result, five paintings went unlocated, possibly lost, or even unrecognized by their present owners as belonging to a larger body of work. In the summer-fall of 2020, The Met featured Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle, an exhibition that reunited the twenty-five extant panels for the first time in sixty years. During the exhibition’s run, two of Lawrence’s "missing" panels remarkably came to light, both located in homes on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

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We crossed the River at McKonkey's Ferry 9 miles above Trenton ... the night was excessively severe ... which the men bore without the least murmur...-Tench Tilghman, 27 December 1776/Struggle Series - No. 10: Washington Crossing the Delaware, Jacob Lawrence (American, Atlantic City, New Jersey 1917–2000 Seattle, Washington), Egg tempera on hardboard

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