John Trumbull painted the famous 1818 scene of delegates presenting the Declaration of Independence.
Trumbull’s large oil painting is commonly called Declaration of Independence, although its full subject is the drafting committee presenting the document to the Second Continental Congress. Trumbull completed the painting in 1818, decades after the 1776 event. He based many of the figures on portraits and personal observation rather than on a surviving eyewitness sketch of the room.
The painting contains 48 figures, but it is often mistaken for a literal depiction of all 56 signers. Not every signer appears, and the scene does not show the later signing of the parchment. Instead, it represents the committee’s presentation of the draft to Congress, a symbolic moment in the document’s creation.
The work is especially familiar because an adapted image appears on the reverse of the United States two-dollar bill. Trumbull also painted other Revolutionary War scenes, but this composition became his best-known representation of the Declaration’s origins.