Excerpt from The Congress Voting Independence: A Painting by Robert Edge Pine and Edward Savage in the Hall of the Historical Society of PennsylvaniaNo picture of an American historical event is better known than J ohn Trumbull's Declaration of Independence. The crude colossal painting covers considerable wall space, twelve by eighteen feet, in the rotunda of the Capitol at Washington, While the beautifully painted small original canvas, only twenty by thirty inches, adorns the Trum bull Gallery, in New Haven, and may readily be accepted as the artist's masterpiece, With its exquisite miniature portraits, several of them, says Mr. J ohn Durand, in his monograph on Trumbull, comparable to the finest limning of Meissonier. It was engraved in line by Asher Brown Durand, in 1820, the first large and important plate artistically executed in this country, Which has been copied large and small, far and Wide, until, with J ohn Randolph's Witty, but senseless, sou briquet of the shin piece tacked to it, it is as generally familiar as Stuart's Athenaeum portrait of Washington.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.