George Caleb Bingham was an American frontier painter noted for his landscapes, his portraits, and especially his representations of Midwestern river life. His best-known subjects are the masculine world of river boatmen and rural politics.
Background
Mr. Bingham was born in Augusta County, Virginia, United States, on March 20, 1811. He was the second of seven children born to Henry Vest and Mary Amend Bingham. Living on a large farm, George Bingham showed a strong interest in drawing at an early age. He supposedly drew on the sides of barns, fence posts, and the walls of the family mill. When George was seven, his father lost most of the family’s property to cover a friend’s debts. Homeless, George left Virginia with his parents, five siblings, his grandfather Matthias Amend, and their slaves. They headed to Missouri. They moved to Franklin, Missouri, where his father operated an inn for 3 years before his death.
Education
When George Bingham was 16, he was apprenticed to a cabinetmaker in the river town of Boonville, Missouri, Soon after, determined to be an artist, he took up sign painting and about 1833 began painting portraits. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Mr. Bingham was largely a self-taught artist. Self-portrait (1835) is typical of his early portraiture. The expression is strong, the handling stiff. In 1837 he went to Natchez, Missouri, to do portraiture. In 1838 while on a 3-month visit to Philadelphia, he made his first genre painting. Titled Western Boatman Ashore, it has been lost, like many of his paintings. His choice of western subjects reflected a deep interest in his fellow Missourians, a concern that also led him to take an active part in regional politics.
During the next 7 years George Bingham was busy painting both portraits and political banners. It was not until 1845 that he took up genre painting in earnest. Among his earliest and finest genre paintings is Fur Traders Descending the Missouri (1845), which depicts a man and a boy in a canoe in early morning. At the St. Louis Mercantile Library are detailed pencil and graywash drawings of these 2 figures as well as studies of 115 other figures that appear in his later works. Except for the addition of color, the figures in his finished paintings are identical with these wash drawings, so they were probably traced onto the canvas.
Most of Mr. Bingham's finest narrative paintings were done between 1845 and 1856. Occasionally he repeated the same subject either exactly, as in the case of County Election, or with slight variations, as in the two versions of the Jolly Flatboatmen. Bingham's canvases of life on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers are as revealing, humorous, and lyrical as Mark Twain's later writing on the subject. Most of the men in these paintings are idle, and the serenity of such river subjects is in strong contrast to his riotous political scenes.
As an active politician, George Bingham knew his new subjects well. His three major political paintings, County Election (1852), Stump Speaking (1854), and Verdict of the People (1855), are packed with men talking or listening, drinking or drunk. George Bingham's finest historical work is the Emigration of Daniel Boone (1851-1852), in which a youthful Boone is shown leading pioneers through Cumberland Gap. This painting, as well as six of his others, was reproduced in contemporary prints. Though during his lifetime his work was seen widely through these reproductions, Bingham himself was not well known outside Missouri. While engaged in painting these scenes of western life, Mr. Bingham traveled a great deal between Missouri and the East to take part in Whig activities and paint portraits.
In 1848 he was elected to the Missouri State Legislature. In 1856 Mr. Bingham made his first trip to Europe, where he painted life-size, commissioned portraits of Washington and Jefferson; he also completed the Jolly Flatboatmen in Port in 1857, his last, most skillful and complex painting of this subject. He returned to St. Louis but, commissioned to paint a portrait of Alexander von Humboldt, returned in 1859 to Düsseldorf, Germany.
During the Civil War, George Bingham was a captain in the Volunteer Reserve Corps; he was state treasurer from 1862 to 1865. In 1865 he began his last major canvas, Order No. 11, a painting provoked by the injustice of a military order in 1863 which had forced many Missourians to leave homes that were then sacked and destroyed. Though effective as propaganda, this canvas lacks the clarity and vitality of his earlier figure paintings. Mr. Bingham spent his last years in politics and portrait painting. In 1877 he was appointed professor of art at the University of Missouri.
Achievements
Although George Bingham is known today for his well-composed, candid genre paintings, he also painted portraits and landscapes. Most of his genre studies were painted during a span of only 10 years. In his 40 years of work he created 50 narrative paintings and portraits. The University of Missouri named the George Caleb Bingham Art Gallery in his honor.
Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers Through the Cumberland Gap
Self-Portrait
Raftsmen Playing Cards
General Order No. 11
Portrait of Vinnie Ream
The Squatters
The Jolly Flatboatman
Mississippi Boatman
General Richard Gentry
Jane Breathitt Sappington
The Storm
Fiddler (study for the Jolly Flatboatmen)
Lighter Relieving a Steamboat Aground
Portrait of Lewis Allen Dicken (l.a.d.)
View of Pike's Peak
Jolly Flatboatmen in Port
Horse Thief
Canvassing for a Vote
The Trappers' Return
Stump Speaking
In a Quandary, Or Mississippi Raftsmen at Cards
Mrs George Caleb Bingham (Sarah Elizabeth Hutchison) and Son, Newton
Miss Sallie Ann Camden
A View of a Lake in the Mountains
John Quincy Adams
Landscape with Fisherman
Samuel Bullitt Churchill
Rural Scene
Dr. Oscar Fitzland Potter
Shooting for the Beef
Boatmen on the Missouri
The County Election
The County Election
Mrs. David Steele Lamme and Son, William Wirt
Landscape with Waterwheel and Boy Fishing
Fur Traders Descending the Missouri
Major James Sidney Rollins
Mrs. Henry Lewis (Elizabeth Morton Woodson)
Politics
Throughout his life, Mr. Bingham held strong beliefs about democracy and politics in the United States. He often used his artistic skills to portray his political views. As early as 1840, George Bingham sketched and painted artful political banners for his political party, the Whig Party.
Views
Quotations:
"To the beautiful belongs an endless variety. It is seen not only in symmetry and elegance of form, in youth and health, but is often quite as fully apparent in decrepit old age. It is found in the cottage of the peasant as well as the palace of kings."
"Many are always praising the by-gone time, for it is natural that the old should extol the days of their youth; the weak, the time of their strength; the sick, the season of their vigor; and the disappointed, the spring-tide of their hopes."
Connections
In the spring of 1836, George Bingham married Sarah Elizabeth Hutchison. They had four children. In 1848 his wife died, and a year later he remarried to Eliza K. Thomas. She died in a mental asylum in 1876. He next married the widow Martha Lykins.
