The painting, with its life-size figures, “is one of the most frequently reproduced images in American culture,” said David Hackett Fischer, Warren professor of history at Brandeis University and author of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Washington’s Crossing.” Leutze’s highly romanticized rendition captures a desperate effort, a turning point in American history, when on Christmas night in 1776 George Washington crossed the Delaware River with 2,500 troops in a surprise attack on Hessian soldiers.

“It’s an experiment,”

The frame “is a tour de force, absolutely the most creative and involved surround for a painting that I have ever seen,” Mr. Wilner, the frame expert, said.

“It’s a challenge to carve, since there isn’t a whole lot of detail in the blowup,” said Mr. Terán, who was born into a family of woodcarvers in a town of woodcarvers, San Antonia de Ibarra, in Ecuador.

Meanwhile, in Long Island City, Queens, a master woodcarver, Félix Terán, has completed a two-foot-long test carving of the frame’s elaborate eagle crest from blowups of the Brady photograph

By the time another collector, John Stuart Kennedy, bought and donated the painting to the Met in 1897, the work had been reframed in a less ornate style, clearly depicted in museum photos from 1899 and 1912. By 1918 it had acquired the plain frame it currently inhabits, believed to be its third. Less than a year ago Dr. Barratt, while studying an 1864 album of Brady’s Art Exhibition photographs in the collection of the New-York Historical Society, noticed an image of the Leutze painting in a dramatic gilded frame dominated by a 12-foot-wide American-eagle crest at the top.

Currier and Ives issued an altered unauthorized version, Professor Fischer said.

How close can we get to the original from the photograph, and what is our responsibility to the original when we aren’t sure about the level of detail?”

San Antonia de Ibarra

“But it is still very much a research project.”

The challenge is reminiscent of the construction of the Hayden Planetarium around the 15.5-ton Willamette Meteorite in 1935, a feat repeated in 2000 when the $210 million Rose Center for Earth and Space was built around that same artifact.

a 143-year-old Mathew Brady photograph.

And an entire new suite of galleries for American paintings and sculpture — scheduled to open in 2010 as the finale of the American Wing renovations — must be built around “Washington Crossing the Delaware.”

Since the canvas cannot be removed through the doorway of its home on the second floor of the museum’s American Wing, its years-long refurbishment will be carried out within the gallery.

“Washington Crossing the Delaware,”

The U.S. has lagged behind when it comes to the issue of cultural access. But in 2016, Americans for the Arts, the largest U.S. think-tank and advocacy group for arts and cultural research, released its “Statement on Cultural Equity.” By recognizing that all Americans deserve “fair and equitable access to cultural resources and support,” Americans in the Arts is echoing what Taiwan has long known—that cultural equity is the bedrock of a stable and flourishing democracy.  

And although Taiwan has a strong organic and local food movement, it’s easy to imagine why farmers might feel fearful of the trend toward globalization. Exhibitions at the Southern Branch serve at least two important functions: to educate viewers about other cultures, and to reveal that cultural purity is a myth. By showcasing the fruits of cultural exchange, the Southern Branch suggests that the strongest defense against protectionist tendencies is a broader sense of identity.

With globalization, Taiwanese farmers are forced to compete with cheap agricultural goods from China and Southeast Asia.

Museum officials drew on international models—such as the relationship between the Musée de Louvre in Paris and Le Louvre Lens in Pas-de-Calais, 200 kilometers to the north—to develop integrated programming that would drive some of the National Palace Museum, Taipei’s 6 million annual visitors to the Southern Branch. Taiwanese legislator Weng Chong-Jun has stated that these visitors won’t only benefit Jiayi’s economy through the tourist sector, they will also boost the region’s historic tea industry.

Thus the inaugural exhibitions at the Southern Branch showcased blue-and-white porcelain objects featuring Islamic calligraphy—presented as gifts between Chinese and Persian ruling families—and Japanese and Korean ceramics, which underscore techniques shared by Chinese artisans. Permanent exhibitions on Asian textiles and Buddhist art further highlight the history of positive cultural exchange across Asia.

In Taiwan, a robust East Asian democracy that last January elected its first female president, cultural equity is serious business—and it offers a strong model for the U.S. to consider.

The National Palace Museum, Taipei, is recognized globally as the leading research institution for Chinese art, and the cultural objects housed in it have lent legitimacy to the Taipei government’s claims that it is the true steward of Chinese culture.

Since 1949, when Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party fled to Taiwan with imperial treasures in tow as the Communist Party took over Mainland China, cultural stewardship has been a first-order concern for the Taiwanese government.

As Taiwanese society grew more democratic from the 1970s onward, and as Taiwanese identity grew more distinct from Mainland China, the role of Taiwan’s cultural policy also shifted—from elitism toward inclusivity and from cultural chauvinism toward cosmopolitanism. At the beginning of the new millennium, Taiwan’s highest legislative body, the Legislative Yuan, announced an ambitious project to provide all citizens with equal access to national cultural heritage. Proposed in 2001 by former museum director Tu Cheng-sheng, the project had an explicit mission to address “the cultural equity between Northern and Southern Taiwan.”

Between 2005 and 2009, the National Endowment for the Arts distributed $38,937.71 per 10,000 residents in grants to New York County, while Arkansas’s Faulkner County received $88.31 per 10,000. While a New York or Washington D.C. resident can choose from dozens of free museums and cultural institutions where they can interact with art from across the globe, residents of rural America might be hard-pressed to reach a single one.

Driving this shift is Taiwan’s underlying geopolitical strategy to decrease its dependence on Mainland China and increase its ties with the rest of Asia.

To that end, museum officials transferred some of the institution’s most popular attractions to the Southern Branch and offered free admission to residents of three southern counties for the first three months after its opening. Curators ensured that prized antiquities—such as the crowd-pleasing Jadeite Cabbage, a piece of jade carved into the form of the green vegetable—would make their rounds at the Southern Branch and attract local visitors. The inclusion of a permanent exhibition about tea culture across Asia offered an additional point of entry to residents of these counties, where tea cultivation is a major sector of the local economy.

With the opening of its Southern Branch in early 2016, a poor Jiayi farmer can access Taiwan’s cultural resources as easily as a wealthy Taipei banker.

By creating a new southern branch of the National Palace museum, the government would correct cultural policies that privileged the more developed, metropolitan North, where Taipei is located, over the more rural, agricultural South.

from elitism toward inclusivity and from cultural chauvinism toward cosmopolitanism.