By tradition, when we think of the Revolutionary War and July 4, a couple of paintings spring to mind.
There’s George Washington Crossing the Delaware, by German-American artist Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze.
And there’s John Trumbull’s Declaration of Independence.
And Grant Wood’s The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.
“Picturing America,” an NEH program to teach history via the visual arts, cites the Leutze, the Wood, as well as John Singleton Copley’s Paul Revere (right) and Gilbert Stuart’s Lansdowne portrait of George Washington — which I won’t show here.
And there are too many others all around to display.
But I was not surprised, when I simply Googled images for “Fourth of July” and “Independence Day,” that none of these came up — at least in the first four or five pages.
Only when I did the same search for “Revolutionary War,” did the Leutze show up (along with a few other, lesser art works). And Google is unquestionably the way many people find illustrations of what they want to know about.
How much richer would our visual culture be if we restored these works of art and similar images into the visual vernacular?
Now that would be revolutionary.