Christopher Columbus on Santa Maria in 1492.

Emanuel Leutze (1816–1868) was a German-born American historical painter whose picture Washington Crossing Delaware (1851) numbers among the most popular and widely reproduced images of an American historical event. Leutze was brought to the United States as a child. In 1841 he returned to Germany to study at the Academy in Düsseldorf. He remained in Germany for almost 20 years and was primarily occupied with painting a series of canvases based on U.S. history.