New frame for Washington portrait at Met

Emanuel Leutze's 1851 "Washington Crossing the Delaware" is the painting most visitors to Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art want to see more than any other, it says.

And starting in January they will see it freshly restored, in a new elaborate frame, in a new prime location.

The museum acquired the 149-by-255-inch painting -- one of its largest -- in 1897. It has been displayed in the American Wing since the 1970s. After a year of restoration, it will return to public view when the new American Wing Galleries for Paintings, Sculpture and Decorative Arts open Jan. 16.

The Met had displayed the painting in a plain gold frame so as not to compete with the image, museum spokesman Harold Holzer said. But a museum researcher doing research at the New-York Historical Society about five years ago came across a stereo photograph of 'Washington Crossing the Delaware' when it was displayed during in 1864.

"This photograph revealed that the original frame was ornate -- a thick gold frame with an American eagle on top and the words 'First in War, First in Peace, First in the Hearts of His Countrymen' across the top . . . ," Holzer said.

So the museum commissioned Eli Wilmer, "the most well-known framemaker in the United States," to recreate that frame, he said.