Emanuel Leutze

Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze (May 24, 1816 – July 18, 1868) was a German-born American painter.

Leutze was born in Schwäbisch Gmünd, Württemberg, Germany but was brought to America as a child. He was notable for his famous historical painting Washington Crossing the Delaware. It is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York.

At the age of twenty-five he had earned enough to take himself to Düsseldorf for a course of art study at the Royal Academy. Almost immediately he began painting historical subjects, his first work, Columbus before the Council of Salamanca was purchased by the Düsseldorf Art Union.

In 1859, Leutze painted a portrait of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney which hangs in the Harvard Law School. In a 1992 opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia described the portrait of Taney, made two years after his infamous decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford as showing Taney "in black, sitting in a shadowed red armchair, left hand resting upon a pad of paper in his lap, right hand hanging limply, almost lifelessly, beside the inner arm of the chair. He sits facing the viewer and staring straight out. There seems to be on his face, and in his deep-set eyes, an expression of profound sadness and disillusionment."

In 1860 Leutze was commissioned by the U.S. Congress to decorate a stairway in the Capitol Building in Washington, DC, for which he painted a large composition, Westward the Course of Empire takes its Way.

The paintings are the excellent portrayal of the events and scenes that we see around us. The painters are the best cameras of the world. They reproduce many different types of pictures. They even draw imaginary pictures that do not exist in this world. We tend to use both thinned oil paints and dense oil paints. Masterpieces can be dyed more than once, but each time it may be different from the existing paintings.h

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