Brief Biography-Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze was born in Württemberg, Germany. His family stayed in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and Philadelphia when he was nine. He studied with the portrait painter John Rubens Smith in Philadelphia, and when his father died in 1831, he scraped a living doing portraits. He eventually got into the Düsseldorf Art Academy, Germany, where he studied under Karl Friedrich Lessing, the historical and landscape painter. He toured Germany and Italy widely, setting up his studio in Düsseldorf and became involved in the Malkasten, the Paintbox Artists Association, founded in 1848, which he helped establish.
He returned to America in 1859 and set up a studio in New York, where he enjoyed a successful career doing historical works. The family settled in Washington, D.C., in 1861, and he died there in 1868. His most famous painting is Washington Crossing Delaware, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. One of his many students in Düsseldorf was the American landscape painter Worthington Whittredge.