“Washington Crossing The Delaware”

From the Official Souvenir Program, p. 130:

Emanuel Leutze’s celebrated painting of “Washington Crossing The Delaware”… which recently sold at an auction in New York for the highest price ever paid for an American picture, $260,000… is on display at Expo ‘74.

The most well-known version, on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Yes, Expo ‘74 was visited by the iconic painting titled Washington Crossing The Delaware by Emanuel Leutze. But as Christie’s Auction House put it in 2015, “not that one.”

The most-viewed and best-known version of the painting hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. It is 21 feet wide and 12 feet tall, a scale that makes Washington and his companions essentially life-sized. However, Leutze (and his assistants) painted several versions of this composition. The original was in Germany during the second World War and was destroyed by Allied Forces during a bombing raid. Two more versions emerged from Leutze’s studio the next year. The larger is now on display in the Met. The smaller one was 5.5 feet wide and was created for the benefit of printmakers, whose faithful reproductions of the painting helped popularize it to the American public. It is this smaller “printmaker’s version” that was purchased in 1973 and that traveled to Expo in 1974.

After Expo ‘74, the painting spent much of the next several decades on intermittent loan to the White House. It remains in private hands, and was sold again in 2022 for $45 million.