America 250: The Essential Paintings of Our Nation
Artists have captured the spirit of the country on canvas for centuries, from Emanuel Leutze's 'Washington Crossing the Delaware' to Jasper Johns's 'Three Flags.'

On Christmas night, 1776, less than six months after the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed and despite freezing temperatures, driving rain and a strong nor'easter, George Washington led a flotilla of soldiers across a frozen river to a surprise victory the next day over the British near Trenton, N.J. It was this epic moment, which buoyed morale and saved the Revolutionary War from collapse, that Emanuel Leutze memorialized in "Washington Crossing the Delaware" (1851), in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gray clouds darken the sky, but Leutze bathes Washington in light, depicting him as an unflinching leader of a squad of men that purposely includes a Native American and a black man.

Leutze

Despite a few inaccuracies—that flag had not yet been adopted, for example—Leutze's massive painting was immediately embraced. A contemporary newspaper called it "the grandest, most majestic, and most effective painting ever exhibited in America." It was reproduced, placed in schoolrooms, used to illustrate history books, and utterly represents the spirit of 1776.

America's artists have always chronicled, celebrated and criticized the nation's historical events, values, achievements and faults in paintings—abetting our understanding of our history.

George Caleb Bingham created several works about the democratic process, none more renowned than "The County Election" (1852) at the Saint Louis Art Museum. Bingham's crowded scene portrays the messiness of democracy: His voters, exclusively white men but of various means and demeanor, include some engaged in serious conversation, others hunched over a newspaper and some who are inebriated; one would-be voter (said to be an immigrant) is swearing an oath; another is perhaps trying to buy votes. Still, portraying the process as essential, Bingham casts the painting in glowing light and crowns it with a blue sign that says "The will of the people the supreme law."

Church

Even before independence, Americans had begun to press west, seeking land and opportunity. Word of the country's natural grandeur and abundant resources seeped back east, and by the mid-1800s Manifest Destiny—the supposedly divinely ordained quest to expand across the whole continent—became a rallying cry. "The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak" (1863) by Albert Bierstadt, at the Met, vividly spreads the message. His stunning, idealized view of the Rockies, here in Wyoming, helped lure pioneers westward. Bierstadt acknowledged, however, the costs to the Native Americans he painted in the foreground, once writing "now is the time to paint them, for they are rapidly passing away, and soon will be known only in history."

Frederic Edwin Church's "Our Banner in the Sky" (1861), at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, also served as an emotion-stirring political statement. Soon after the start of the Civil War, Church turned the atmospheric effects of a rising sun, striated clouds, and stars peeking through a patch of sky into a tattered Union flag. Grounded by a barren tree serving as a flagpole, the standard flies over a war-torn landscape. Like Bierstadt, Church was not just stoking patriotic fervor, but also evoking divine providence as favoring the North's cause.

Beard

America was an agrarian nation then, as charmingly rendered by Grant Wood's "Fall Plowing" (1931), lent to the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa, by Deere & Co.—one of many landscapes he painted honoring the heartland's fertile farmland. But the U.S. rose to become an industrial dynamo and international power because of our financial system, industrial prowess and ingenuity. No better rendition of Wall Street—founded under a buttonwood tree in 1792—exists than "The Bulls and Bears in the Market" (1879) by William Holbrook Beard at the New York Historical. Probably a satire inspired by the Panic of 1873, the painting humorously anthropomorphizes animals to show the chaos of the market, with each contingent fighting for control. Yet he made the bulls more prominent, and shined the sun on the white one in the center.

Demuth

Innovation and ambition played a critical role in America's success, and that is the true subject of "Brooklyn Bridge: Variation on an Old Theme" (1939) by Joseph Stella at New York's Whitney Museum. When it was dedicated in May 1883, the bridge was a triumph of engineering, the longest suspension span in the world. Stella painted the bridge several times, sometimes—given the rise of abstraction—less literally. Here, addressing it head-on as an automobile would, Stella turned its cables, piers and gothic arches—an accomplishment he once deemed "the shrine containing all the efforts of the new civilization of America"—into a work of art.

Charles Demuth created a different metaphor for American industry. With "My Egypt" (1927) at the Whitney, he equated the nation's factories and industrial might with the monumental constructions of Egyptian pharaohs. Rendered in ultra-realistic Precisionist style, his steel-and-concrete grain elevator dwarfs its surroundings, while crisscrossing rays of intense sunlight link it to the heavens.

Socioeconomically, the U.S. was fast-changing, its pace accelerated when, from the 1910s to the 1970s, six million black Americans fled racial violence and constraints on their liberty in the Great Migration. "From every southern town migrants left by the hundreds to travel north" (1940-41), in Washington's Phillips Collection, from "The Migration Series," a 60-panel narrative cycle of paintings by Jacob Lawrence that was split with the Museum of Modern Art, captures this exodus in a simple but touching way. His figures, generic, without details, carry all they own in sacks on their backs, hoping that when their journey concluded they would find a better life. Some found labor, feeding industry's needs; others settled into a hopeless life in the underclass. Together, they changed the course of American history.

Ruscha

For better and worse, the automobile shaped American culture—encouraging the mobility that added vigor to the economy, creating the romance of the open road, prompting leisurely Sunday drives and offering drivers an identity marker. Americans grew car-obsessed. Ed Ruscha took ordinary photos of gas stations along Route 66, then painted "Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas" (1963), at Dartmouth's Hood Museum in Hanover, N.H. A spare image betraying Ruscha's roots in advertising, the station glows brightly in fluorescent lighting, beckoning drivers but also hinting at the ensuing blight of strip malls, shoddy motels, billboards and other adverse effects of the automobile.

By the mid-20th century, Hollywood boomed—beyond dollars. It also spread celebrity culture, here and abroad. Andy Warhol paid attention, creating "Marilyn Diptych" (1962), in London's Tate Modern. What better way to comment on film-star fixation than to repeat the image of Marilyn Monroe, drawn from a publicity photo, 50 times? He placed two panels of 25 images each side by side, half colorized and half black and white, alluding to religious diptychs of the past. It both commented on and encouraged celebrity culture.

Johns

The American flag, too, is known as a symbol of freedom to most but sometimes contested. In painting "Three Flags" (1958), now at the Whitney, Jasper Johns invited viewers to reflect on the meaning of the symbol and the country itself. He changed it by creating a textured surface with color variations and what might be viewed as imperfections, and by layering three flags, in diminishing sizes, atop one another, that advance—or recede. But it's still one flag, one America. Whether your takeaway is patriotism, a feeling of the country's many dimensions, or something else, you are free to decide.

And as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the day the founders courageously decided to throw off despotism, isn't that the essence of America?