The Death of Jane McCrea

The Death of Jane McCrea is an 1804 history painting by the American artist John Vanderlyn. It depicts a scene from the American Revolutionary War when Jane McCrea, was abducted and murdered by two Indian warriors. The murder took place during the Saratoga campaign of 1777, with the warriors being part of a British expedition under General John Burgoyne and murdering McCrea despite the fact that she was engaged to Loyalist officer David Jones, who was also part of the expedition.^[1]

Vanderlyn was supportive of France during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and the painting was used to illustrate an anti-British theme via portraying a murder by British-allied Indians and depicting Jones, shown in the distance rushing to try and rescue McCrea, not in the red coat of the British Army but the blue coat of the Continental Army.^[2] Vanderlyn had moved to Paris and became the first American ever to exhibit at the Paris Salon when he displayed two portraits at the Salon of 1800 in the Louvre.^[3] He returned to Paris again and exhibited this work, his first history painting, at the Salon of 1804. It was purchased the following year by Robert Fulton for the American Academy of the Fine Arts in New York City. Today the painting is in the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut.^[4]

• Boime, Albert. A Social History of Modern Art, Volume 2: Art in an Age of Bonapartism, 1800-1815. University of Chicago Press, 1993.
• Kornhauser, Elizabeth Mankin & Ellis, Amy. Hudson River School: Masterworks from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. Yale University Press, 2003.

• Edgerton, Samuel Y. (December 1965). "The Murder of Jane Mccrea: The Tragedy of an American Tableau D'Histoire". The Art Bulletin. 47 (4): 481–492. doi:10.1080/00043079.1965.10790784. JSTOR 3048306.