Read David McCullough’s essay here. “Passage of the Delaware” (1819), by Thomas Sully Thomas Sully is unique among American ...

T he painter John Trumbull (1756–1843) isn’t well known, but every sensate American knows his icons of courage, revolution, and war. In a series of paintings of episodes in the Revolutionary ...

Napoleon Sarony, “The Declaration of Independence,” 1843–1853. Harry T. Peters, “America on Stone.” Lithography Collection. Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History This hand-colored ...

Glorious Lessons: John Trumbull, Painter of the American Revolution, by Richard Brookhiser (Yale, 276 pp., $30) Trumbull marks a departure from the author’s previous biographical subjects, all of whom ...

Paintings and drawings created by participants in the events of those tumultuous years are scarcer still. Among the era’s artists, John Trumbull considered himself to be uniquely qualified by ...

The original Trumbull paintings and this Sarony print, all titled The Declaration of Independence, provide the date July 4th, 1776, under the title, which is why these images have been presumed by ...

John Trumbull (1756–1843) saw the birth of the nation. His father was the patriot governor of Connecticut. He himself served as an aide to George Washington and Horatio Gates, witnessed the ...

Take, for example, John Trumbull (1715–1787), a painter who had several enslaved people living in his household. Another example is Gilbert Winter Moss (1828–1899), a banker who owned Richard ...