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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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