Do you think that Washington and the flag-bearer would have increased the difficulty and peril by standing up? Don’t you know that to stand up in a boat even on smooth water is a foolhardy thing to do? It is a frequent cause of accident and loss of life in pleasure parties. On an occasion so serious as this would the leader have been guilty of such folly? Certainly not. Washington and every man, not actually engaged in navigating the boat, would have been sitting low down, so as to help preserve the balance and offer as little resistance as possible to the wind. Here, then, is another indifference to facts in this so-called historic picture. But Leutze did not care about facts. His motive was to bring out the heroic character of the events. So he made Washington strike a heroic attitude. It is the way in which a popular actor takes the center of the stage and strikes an attitude and waits for the applause. Leutze wanted a central figure around which to build up his composition and, in order to support the central figure, reared another behind it holding aloft the flag. Thus he wins applause, at once, for the star actor and the patriotic sentiment of the scene. In fact his composition is similar in intention and arrangement to the grouping of figures on the stage of a popular theater. It is theatrical. I do not say dramatic, but theatrical, between which two ideas there is this distinction. When we speak of a scene being dramatic we mean that the action of the plot has been vividly expressed by means that create an illusion of truth--that the characters behave as they might be expected to do in real life under the circumstances. By theatrical, on the other hand, we imply that the behaviour of the actors, instead of “holding the mirror up to nature,” is regulated so as to produce an artificial effectiveness. Such a scene we call theatrical, or stagey. And the same words, in my opinion, can be applied to this picture. For Leutze failed to realise, not only that truth may be stronger than fiction, but also that it may be more impressive than artificial effectiveness. The true word spoken in simple earnestness, the true act done simply, often move men’s imagination, where loud rhetoric and ostentatious conduct leave it cold. So, too, in a picture, a deeper sentiment may be aroused by simple truth of representation, than by a display of mock heroics.