Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze
Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze
1816 - 1868
American painter of German birth. When he was nine, Leutze’s family immigrated to America and settled in Philadelphia. In 1834 he began to study art with the draughtsman John Rubens Smith (1775–1849). Leutze developed his skills as a portrait painter by taking likenesses to be engraved for publication in the National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans and then working as an itinerant painter. He also experimented with imaginative compositions, such as the Poet’s Dream (Philadelphia, PA Acad. F.A.). Philadelphia patrons sponsored his study in Europe, and in 1841 he enrolled at the Königliche Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. Although attempts at history painting won approval in Germany and in the USA, Leutze left the academy in 1843. He travelled for two years in Germany and Italy, during which time he became convinced of the importance of freedom and democracy, which he believed to be fundamental institutions of the American political system.
Leutze returned to Düsseldorf, where he married and became one of the city’s most prolific painters and active liberals in the period preceding the March 1848 Revolution. As president of the Verein Düsseldorfer Künstler and co-founder of the Malkasten (an artists’ club based on democratic principles), Leutze led the independent artists’ community and was friend, adviser, and financial backer to numerous American painters, such as Eastman Johnson, Worthington Whittredge, and Albert Bierstadt, who were studying in Düsseldorf.
Leutze’s fame grew steadily as a result of the success of his history paintings, especially those devoted to Christopher Columbus. His most popular painting was Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851; New York, Met.), and in 1851 Leutze travelled to the USA to exhibit it and to petition Congress to commission another version and a pendant, Washington Rallying the Troops at Monmouth (1854; Berkeley, U. CA, A. Mus.). He lived in Düsseldorf until 1859, when he became discouraged by the political situation in Germany and a decline in commissions and so settled once more in the USA. Several important undertakings ensued, including the 1862 mural Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way for the Capitol. After the Civil War he painted portraits of Abraham Lincoln and various Union army officers. Leutze was working on the cartoon for a mural depicting the Emancipation of the Slaves when he died.
Leutze was a talented portraitist but is usually regarded as an artist of ambitious, large-scale history pieces, although the quality of his history paintings is inconsistent. He painted figures well but occasionally slipped into melodrama. His announced intention to paint ‘a long cycle from the first dawnings of free institutions in the middle ages…to the Revolution and Declaration of Independence’ resulted in some handsome paintings (e.g. Hohenstaufen, Württemberg, c. 1854; New York, Century Assoc.) and culminated in several canvases devoted to George Washington: the 1851 version of Washington Crossing the Delaware became an icon of American history and patriotism. There were two other versions of this painting; an earlier one, originally in Bremen, was destroyed by fire during World War II; a third, smaller replica, painted with Eastman Johnson, was the model in 1853 for the engraving by Paul Girardet (1821–93) published by Goupil, Vibert & Co., the distribution of which enhanced the painting’s already considerable renown. [Barbara Groseclose. "Leutze, Emanuel." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 9, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T050679.]
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