Upstaging History

Not even Hollywood's greatest epics of gore can hold a candle to those monumental battle paintings of yore. Every schoolboy knows General Wolfe breathing his last on the Plains of Abraham, the redcoats storming up Bunker Hill, or Washington crossing the Delaware.

For a majestic instant in oils, the deadly carnage by grapeshot and musketry is stilled, and the course of history is reversed by a great man. Last week one of the finest U.S. battle tableaux, unseen for 75 years, went on view at the University of California's Berkeley campus.

The painting was Emanuel Leutze's 1854 work, Washington Rallying the Troops at Monmouth, which since 1892 has lain rolled up in a redwood chest in the basement of Berkeley's Hearst Gymnasium for Women. Larger than its companion piece, the unforgettable 22-ft. by 12-ft. Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851), the oil portrays a bigger than life-size scene of a crucial moment. On a scorching June day in 1778, Major General Charles Lee had ordered the Continental army to retreat before the redcoats. Then, in the nick of time, Washington, accompanied by a cockaded Alexander Hamilton and a bareheaded Marquis de Lafayette, gallops up to rally the troops and confound the crestfallen poltroon Lee,* slumping in his saddle. History records a piqued Washington demanding in Olympian tones: "I desire to know, sir, what is the reason, whence arises this disorder and confusion?"

Click! went Leutze, a German-born artist, who actually executed the painting in Dusseldorf, using all the American tourists he could find in town for their facial characteristics. In the Napoleonic tradition of Baron Gros and Gericault, disorder and confusion are hardly apparent. The balanced composition centers around a middle-ground bridge built by the unrealistic posture of Washington's war horse. The dog, which shares the foreground pool of water with parched troops, helps to tranquilize the hustle of hoofs.

However stilted, the painting conjures up the ideal of a bygone age, giving to history a heroic sense rather than data processing it. Leutze even persuaded his exacting student Albert Bierstadt, then 24 (later to become one of the chief chroniclers of the Rocky Mountain landscape), to climb a ladder and touch up the bright sky on the left. There was precious little tranquillity that he could add to the blood-and-thunder turbulence of gun smoke.

* Subsequently convicted by court-martial, the English-born Lee died in disgrace and degradation four years later. He was no kin to the Revolutionary hero "Light Horse Harry" and the other famous Lees of Virginia.

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