Throughout history we find ourselves, our society, our world, encompassed by art. While languages present us with barriers and governments with borders, art has a divine ability to disregard any constraints the world presents. In Darwinian terms, art is a cockroach- suppressed, banned and attacked, it has survived the ages. From catastrophic natural events, to world wars; people die, civilizations vanish yet art remains. Aside from its tenacious efforts to survive, it procures unfathomable power. Paintings have caused wars, brought people to tears and enlivened populations. The influence of art is subjective, yes, but in the course of time there are certain works that have had a universal affect on human beings, and it is in those reactions that we find the most powerful paintings. In 1851 Emmanuel Gottlieb Leutze was commissioned to paint a painting.[1] This however would not be a conventional work; it would be neither a portrait of a duke, nor a landscape for an aristocrat. Emmanuel Leutze was asked by his country, heart in hand, to invigorate his people. [2] His Washington Crossing the Delaware exhumes this unfathomable and inexplicable power that art carries on its shoulders. Not only were his people inspired, but the painting’s spark of inspiration, it’s flame, transcends through time with an everlasting and universal profoundness. Reached by this profoundness, I find myself in a state of inspirational drunkenness. My immediate infatuation with this painting has become a discovered kinship as I find myself in each layer of Leutze’s magnum opus.