- Title: Anthony Wayne
- Author: Johnson, Fry & Co.
- Date: c.1861
- Condition: A crisp steel engraving on a very clean sheet. Superb.
- Inches: 8 1/4 x 10 3/4 [Paper]
- Centimeters: 20.95 x 27.30 [Paper]
- Product ID: 308730
Daring “Mad Anthony”; Revolutionary Battlefield Tactician
Steel-engraved portrait from National Portrait Gallery of Eminent Americans, after a painting by Alonzo Chappel. A fine steel engraving printed on wove paper, issued as part of Johnson, Fry & Co.’s ambitious patriotic series celebrating notable figures in the nation’s political and cultural history.
Anthony Wayne (1745–1796), nicknamed “Mad Anthony,” was a Pennsylvania-born officer whose aggressive leadership made him one of the Continental Army’s most celebrated Revolutionary War generals. Trained as a surveyor and active in the Pennsylvania legislature before the war, he rose rapidly from colonel of the 4th Pennsylvania Regiment in 1776 to brigadier general the following year, leading troops in some of the conflict’s hardest fighting, including the Philadelphia campaign, Brandywine, Germantown, Monmouth, and especially the daring night assault at Stony Point on the Hudson River in July 1779. His reputation combined audacity in battle with meticulous preparation, qualities that endeared him to Washington and secured his place among the Revolution’s foremost field commanders.
Wayne’s national significance extended beyond Yorktown: in the 1790s President Washington appointed him commander in chief of the U.S. Army, tasking him with leading the campaign in the Northwest Territory. His decisive victory at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794 and the subsequent Treaty of Greenville opened much of what is now Ohio and the Old Northwest to American expansion, fulfilling a key strategic aim of the new republic. He died in 1796 near Presque Isle, Pennsylvania, but his memory endures in numerous place names and in engraved portraits that present him as the archetypal Revolutionary general—bold, uniformed, and unflinching, a fitting subject for 19th‑century “eminent American” series.