THE ART OF REVOLUTION

How do you get into history? In an armchair with a book and some brandy? On the couch, bingeing Ken Burns? Maybe you cruise the River Towns scanning roadsides for historical plaques and monuments. When we lived in Philadelphia, I liked to walk a few blocks to Independence Square to wait for the tower bell to ring (the Centennial one, from 1876, not the cracked icon) and vibe with the spirits. Always worked for me.

This year is special. It’s the nation’s Semiquincentennial, the 250th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence. That means extra attention, extra-big crowds, and extraordinary celebrations across the country and right here in the River Towns, where the revolution was real.

To convey something as ineffable as the birth of freedom, we’ve long turned to art in various forms: painting, film, music, theater, sculpture, writing, even textiles, furniture, and architecture. All of which will be deployed this year in exhibits planned from Easton to Trenton.

For our modern-day stewards of history, the 2026 calendar is full. For Jennifer Martin, executive director of Friends of Washington Crossing Park in Bucks County, this year means showing off spiffed-up buildings, a refreshed museum, a new Durham boat, and a forward-looking approach. “For us, it’s about this once-in-a-lifetime celebration,” she says, “but also what this park will continue to offer in perpetuity, the people that it will touch, the experience that people will have here.”

Across the water at New Jersey’s Washington Crossing State Park, two highly anticipated arrivals will be revealed: a breathtaking 105-year-old mural, vividly restored after a half-century in forgotten storage, and a dramatic, curvilinear museum and visitor center in which the mural will be prominently displayed. The visitor center will be set into the hillside overlooking the river, providing dramatic views of the waterfront from the rooftop meadow.

In Doylestown, the Michener Art Museum will mount “The Crossing: Picturing the American Revolution,” an ambitious exhibition spanning 200 years, from Edward Hicks’s Washington at the Delaware to Ai Weiwei’s full-size recreation of Emmanuel Leutze’s classic Washington Crossing the Delaware—made of Lego-like toy bricks.

The parks at the two Washington Crossings—across the river from each other, roughly seven miles south of New Hope and Lambertville—are a natural nexus for contemplating the Revolutionary War in the River Towns. The twin villages, unincorporated pockets of Upper Makefield and Hopewell townships, are where 2,400 troops crossed the icy Delaware River on Christmas night in 1776 to surprise the Hessians at Trenton and reenergize (and perhaps save) the revolution.

The warm-weather months will include fireworks on the Fourth of July, which haven’t happened at either park in nearly a decade. (See the listing of summer events at both Washington Crossing Parks, on page 77.) Come December, the traditional crossing reenactment will expand to include the battles of Trenton and Princeton, with hundreds of reenactors coming in from across the country to bolster our battalion of local faux fighters.

Both Washington Crossing museums are outfitted for our screen-centric twenty-first-century society. The Pennsylvania museum will have two new movies, one a retelling of the crossing. The other is a documentary about the history of the reenactment, started in 1953 by Lambertville impresario St. John Terrell. The documentarian Ken Burns, whose crew filmed part of his epic PBS series The American Revolution at Washington Crossing, appears in the film, as does historian and author Rick Atkinson.

On the New Jersey side, they’re going immersive. Visitors to the new museum will be able to board a mock ferry for the “Crossing Experience.” The lights will dim for that middle-of-the-night feel, and amid the sounds of sloshing water, cracking ice, clanking artillery, neighing horses, and shouting officers, they’ll take a five-minute version of the eighteenth-century ride across the river in a ferry, a trip that could take twenty minutes or more, depending on weather and water conditions. Projected on the walls they’ll see dim figures and flickering campfires on the far shore grow larger in a CGI film created by Argentine Productions, a Pittsburgh-based company that specializes in museum films.

You’ll hear teenage fifer John Greenwood recalling how it “rained, hailed, snowed, and froze, and at the same time blew a perfect hurricane,” though the climate-controlled immersive will remain free of precipitation and wind.

“Experiential, hands-on, sights and sounds—that’s our goal,” says park historian Mark Sirak. “I think everybody will thoroughly enjoy what we’re doing. We want to ignite that passion, that love, that interest—spark the younger generation.”

Annette Earling, executive director of the Washington Crossing Park Association, notes that many enthusiasts “caught the fire” fifty years ago during the Bicentennial. “We’re here to get the next generation of historians and reenactors and people who care about historic sites and art,” Earling says. “This museum is a fantastic way to do that. The art—the mural, the mosaic, the tile floor—it’s going to be a big draw.”

The terrazzo floor in the museum’s glassy entryway has an inlaid map of the Delaware River and shorelines, from the crossing downriver to Trenton, making the scale of the endeavor more comprehensible, and more impressive. A mosaic from the Moravian Pottery & Tile Works will offer another take on the crossing. When visitors turn to look out the towering windows—or from the traditional overlook, a stone wall constructed nearly a century ago by the Works Progress Administration—they can gaze down to the river and imagine history.

The pièce de résistance of the new visitor center is a painting in the west-facing “flex gallery,” fifteen and a half feet wide and nine feet, eight inches tall, titled Washington Crossing the Delaware. The noted wartime illustrator George Matthews Harding painted the mural for the RKO Capitol Theater in Trenton in 1921. The painting, oil on jute (a kind of burlap), endured decades of smoke damage (cigarettes, cigars, and a real fire) before being carefully peeled off the theater’s wall by heroic art lovers in 1969 prior to the building’s demolition.

The mural was rolled up around a cylinder and stashed in the basement of Skylands Manor, a historic mansion in Ringwood State Park, near the New York state border. It was briefly considered for Washington Crossing State Park’s visitor center, which was built for the Bicentennial in 1976. But it didn’t fit. So there the mural rested, sagging across sawhorses amid boxed Christmas decorations, for half a century.

The discovery of Harding’s painting can be traced to author and historian Patricia Millen, a Ewing resident who was researching a book on the Washington Crossing parks in 2021 when she saw references to the mural and tracked it down. “George Harding is an amazing artist,” she says. “I had to find out what happened to it.”

Harding was indeed a remarkable man. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), where his instructors included the renowned illustrator Howard Pyle. Harding was a world traveler and successful magazine illustrator when he was sent to Europe as a military artist for the U.S. Navy and Army during World War I. (He was one of eight combat artists attached to the American Expeditionary Forces in France.) Between wars, he taught at PAFA and the University of Pennsylvania, and executed several murals for the federal government, besides the Trenton work. When World War II broke out, he again served as a combat artist in the Pacific—at age 60.

The first peeks at the unrolled painting were not encouraging. It was dark and brittle, and the whole piece was deformed because the rolled-up artwork had sagged over the decades. Several earlier repairs were all-too-obvious. As luck would have it, just ten minutes upriver was the studio of an esteemed art conservator.

“The painting was in rough condition because it’s over 100 years old,” says Christyl Cusworth, the conservator, whose studio, on South Main Street in Lambertville, is typically chockablock with paintings awaiting repair and restoration. “It wasn’t originally prepared to be stored for the length of time it was.”

Her painstaking work extended over two years. The painting was mounted on a new layer of linen over a custom aluminum stretcher and carefully cleaned. Cusworth identified Harding’s palette of just five colors and began the work of infilling the empty or damaged spaces. The result is breathtaking.

“I think most people will be awestruck,” says Millen, whose book about the endeavor, Restoring a Masterpiece: George Matthews Harding’s Mural Washington Crossing the Delaware (Washington Crossing Park Association), was published this spring. “The colors are so beautiful, even though they’re muted. With the snow, there’s enough color with the boats and hats to have it pop.”

Its composition and use of angles (muskets, oars, poles, the lines of troops in the background) give it a sense of “movement and intensity,” Millen says. The artist’s empathy toward soldiers shines through, she says. “It looks cold, too. These guys were freezing, and the coloring of it captures that, too.”

Millen, 68, grew up in Ewing and calls the park her childhood playground. She worked there as a teenager during the 1976 Bicentennial and was a founding member of the Washington Crossing Park Association, the citizens’ group that helps maintain it. Her career took her to historic sites from Princeton to New York state. “This is a nice ending to my long career,” she says, “to have this mural as sort of a legacy.”

Picture this: You, in a Durham boat, just like the 2,400 soldiers who made the crossing 250 years ago. That’s one of the goals of the Friends of Washington Crossing Park, on the Pennsylvania side of the river.

The organization partnered with the Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia to build a new Durham boat, the workhorse vessel that made the crossing possible. There are four others in the park’s boat barn, used in the reenactment, and this new fifth one will be on display near the riverbank, accessible to visitors. (That’s right, you won’t actually be in the water. Safety first.)

“You can climb into the Durham, and taking a photo from the side, you’re going to look like you’re on the river,” Jennifer Martin says. “We get 10,000 kids a year. We can talk about ferrying an army, what this looked like, the size and power of the boat.”

She likes to quote a colleague, Beth L. Hill at Fort Ticonderoga in New York, extolling “the power of the past.” “Our goal,” Martin says, “is that by the Fourth of July, there’s a different, more immersive experience here. A dynamic visitor experience. When people come to the park, we wanted there to be a lot for them to see.”

A survey of patrons from about five years ago asked: “What do you love? What could we do better? What do you want to see more of?” Martin summarizes the results as: preservation, education, and community celebration.

Preservation included the restoration and opening of two early nineteenth-century homes—the Frye House and Hibbs House—and the creation of new interpretive spaces at McConkey’s Ferry Inn, the Thompson-Neely House and Grist Mill, and at two buildings on Route 532 by the bridge, the Mahlon K. Taylor House and Taylorsville General Store. The cost of all that work came to slightly more than $10 million.

The Frye House is now furnished with replicas of basic furnishings and clothing that would be typical of officers’ quarters, some of it financed by a man in Tennessee, Tom Hand, through his organization, Americana Corner. “This is a man who said, ‘I want to invest in sites that are telling history on a national level,’” Martin says.

The park’s ongoing living history events have grown in recent years, embracing groups formerly marginalized.

“We’re immersing people in the history, the living history,” Martin says. The events, she says, “are not just hands-on, but sensory. You can smell the fire. You can sit around it, you can touch the artifacts in the officers’ quarters.” She loves to hear from African American students who tell her, “I didn’t realize my ancestors were part of this history.”

“Think about your own field trips as a kid,” she says.

“The excitement of that, encountering that space, and not just reading about it. That’s really what’s so powerful for us.”

The film to be shown in the museum auditorium replaces one that, truth be told, came to feel a little dated and corny. The new movie, produced by Wide Awake Films, of Kansas City, Missouri, appears more moody and authentic.

A bronze relief by the sculptor Ellen Qiong Schicktanz of Emanuel Leutze’s famed painting Washington Crossing the Delaware is now on display in the Visitor Center, offering people who are blind a chance to experience art and history. (Another version is at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia.)

“This is the power of private philanthropy,” Martin says.

“Half of what we do here is funded through donors, through memberships, through grants. This is why this site has so much to offer, because the community has said, ‘We’re going to step up and be part of that.’”

It’s not a reach to call Leutze’s masterpiece the most recognizable painting in America. The monumental 1851 oil, twenty-one feet wide and twelve feet tall, is in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Leutze, a German who spent much of his youth in Philadelphia, painted it to inspire his fellow citizens toward freedom and democratic reforms.

The painting was exhibited here at Washington Crossing Historic Park from 1959 until 1970, when it was returned to the Met. Copies have been displayed at the park ever since. Sticklers love to point out the inaccuracies—the flag is wrong, the ice isn’t correct, the boat isn’t right, and it’s broad daylight—but its pulse-quickening impact is undeniable.

It’s been reproduced and parodied (I especially like the Disney and Muppets versions) countless times. And this year, at the Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, the work, and the crossing itself, provides the inspiration for an entire show, “The Crossing: Picturing the American Revolution,” on display from June 27 to January 10, 2027.

Chief curator Laura Igoe mixed works from history, including two by Edward Hicks, circa 1830s, of Washington at the river and the Battle of Trenton, with twentieth- and twenty-first-century works. There’s a realistic take by William Francis Taylor from 1937 and a moody oil by illustrator Charles W. Hargens.

Then there’s some modern-day wakeup calls: Miracles and Glory Abound, by Pittsburgh native vanessa german, a room-dominating mixed-media installation using found objects; a series of recent works by Philadelphia’s Mark Thomas Gibson; and Chinese contemporary artist Ai Weiwei’s massive Lego version of Leutze’s painting.

The show is “about the power of images to spread ideas about history,” Igoe says. The pervasiveness of Leutze’s image is irresistible, she says: “They want to engage with that material, they want to subvert it, they want to build upon it. They want to question it. And I think that’s an exciting thing to explore.”

Approaching the Semiquincentennial, Igoe says she and the staff wondered, “What can we do that’s unique to us, that sets us a little bit apart from all the other stories and exhibitions and programs that would be happening in the Philadelphia area? And pretty quickly, I thought about Washington’s crossing. It’s so close to us, and we have some artwork in our collection that’s about the crossing.”

The show will include a 1999 oil painting by Robert Beck titled Second Crossing. The artist, a longtime River Towns resident who also spends time in New York and Maine, says he wanted to convey the “gloom and the gravity” of the actual event. So he read the history, went to the Durham boat barn, and stood by the river in a snowstorm in the dark. Just like 1776. He couldn’t see much.

The result is a somber stunner that reveals itself the longer you look. “I have you down at deck level—put you in the mix,” Beck says. “It helps you smell the ice as it’s going past.” No faces, just silhouettes. “Somebody who looks at this painting, I wanted their feet to feel cold. Cold and wet.”

Leutze it’s not. “When you present an alternative,” Beck says, “not only does it advance the notion that there is a different consideration, but it suggests that there can be a whole lot of different considerations, sometimes as many as there are observers or participants.”

That notion floats Igoe’s boat. She says the Taylor painting, with its Pennsylvania Impressionist sensibility, had a similar goal, “where he’s rethinking that event and thinking about how it really would have looked. The figure of Washington is much less heroicized. He’s a shadowy figure.”

German’s piece has “a bit of humor in it, but she’s also expressing ideas about Black identity,” Igoe says. Ai Weiwei’s toy brick piece, she says, “makes me think of Andy Warhol and the reproduction of images and mass image culture.” The exhibition includes mass-produced household items like a ceramic pot bearing an image of Thomas Sully’s 1819 The Passage of the Delaware, on loan from the Mercer Museum across the street. (The Mercer’s big show about the Loyalist Doan Gang, who stole money from the Patriots, will continue its popular run all year.)

Joshua Lessard, director of exhibitions, says the Michener show embraces the American mythos and how “that myth, that story, that image, is still very much alive today.”

Gibson, despite the abstract nature of some of his work, considers himself a history painter, though none of the works on display explicitly reference Washington. Returns on a Homeward Tide (2025) shows a boat and partial flag; Flag 1 (The Big One) (2024) is a striking variation on the American flag with whitecapped waters instead of stripes.

“It’s always interpretation,” Gibson says, “the interpretation of the individual who’s living through the experience and how they’re trying to illustrate that moment.” His work, Gibson says, has “always been this conversation about what’s happening in the country, and as I’m living it.”

Bill Stieg is a former editor and writer for Men’s Health and a regular contributor to River Towns. He wrote about the art curator and archivist David Leopold in the Spring issue.