Portrait of General George Washington (1732-1799) at the Battle of Trenton, full-length, in military uniform with a blue coat with a yellow waistcoat and breeches, a pair of seals hanging from his waist, his telescope in his right hand, his left hand holding his right glove and hat, resting on his sword, an aide beside holding his white charger by the reins, the battle ensuing beyond, after Col. John Trumbull (1756-1843)

This is a copy of the celebrated portrait which the city of Charleston, South Carolina, commissioned from Col. John Trumbull, then America's leading portrait painter, in 1792, and which he painted in Philadelphia, the seat of the National Government (now in the Yale University Art Gallery, see T.E. Stebbins, Jr., and G. Gorokhoff, Checklist of American Paintings at Yale University, New Haven, 1982, no. 1606 and T. Sizer, op. cit., fig. 95-6). General George Washington (1732-1799), father of the American revolution, Commander in Chief of the American revolutionary forces, and later America's first president is here shown at one of the most critical junctures of that struggle for independence and of his own career; the battle of Trenton (Jan. 1777), preceding the battle of Princeton. With a superior enemy approaching and retreat impossible, Washington displayed a tactical brilliance and decisiveness in conceiving of a plan to return by a night march into the country from which he had just been driven, thereby severing the enemy's communications and destroying their depot at Brunswick and reversing the tide of the war. Trumbull's portrait, as his autobiography (edit T. Sizer, New Haven, 1953, pp. 170-1), makes clear, is conceived to show the General at his most heroic, noble and inspired. The original was however rejected by the city of Charleston as being too heroic and historical in flavour: the artist retained it until members of the Society of Cincinnati in Connecticut provided Yale with the $500 necessary to purchase it in 1806.

It is unlikely that Trumbull took the prototype with him when he returned to London in 1794. A reduction 'sent to Mr. Poggi, to print from, left at Mr. West's, Newman Street, London... 1797' is recorded (T. Sizer, op. cit., p. 83) and might have served as the immediate model for this canvas.

It is possible that this picture was painted for the 1st Marquess of Bute who was certainly advanced in his political views and surprised some contemporaries by supporting the early phases of the revolution in France.