George Caleb Bingham

American painter

• Born: March 20, 1811
• Birthplace: Augusta County, Virginia
• Died: July 7, 1879
• Place of death: Kansas City, Missouri

Bingham was the first American artist to record life on the mid-nineteenth century frontier in paintings of sensitive social commentary and high aesthetic quality.

Early Life

Known throughout his career as “the Missouri Artist,” Bingham was, in fact, born into a long-established southern family. Henry Vest Bingham, his father, whose ancestors probably came from England in the latter half of the seventeenth century, married Mary Amend, of German and French Huguenot descent, and they started their married life farming tobacco in Virginia. George, born on the farm, which was just west of Charlottesville, Virginia, was one of eight children. In 1819, Bingham’s father got into financial difficulties, lost his business, and went west with his family to Franklin, Missouri. In 1820, he opened an inn and dealt in tobacco as a sideline. On his death in 1823, the family moved to a farm outside town, where Mrs. Bingham ran a small school.

There is some biographical evidence that Bingham was interested in drawing, but there is no proof that he ever had any formal training. Apprenticed to a cabinetmaker at sixteen, he may have worked as such, and perhaps as a sign painter, and there is some suggestion that he planned to study law. In 1833, he was a professional portrait painter. His early work is awkward and somewhat primitive, and seems to indicate that he was self-taught. Nevertheless, he was able to make a living at it, moving around the Columbia, Missouri, area, and in 1836, he was sufficiently confident to offer his services in St. Louis. In that year, he married Sarah Elizabeth Hutchinson of Boonville.

During the late spring of 1838, Bingham went to Philadelphia, evidently to study. There is no record of his entering any art school, but he did buy a collection of old master engravings and some antique sculpture casts, both of which were commonly used for art instruction at the time. The city itself was rich in examples of international art, and Bingham must have seen some of it. He may have gone on to New York also, because a painting of his, one of his first genre pieces, Western Boatmen Ashore , was shown at the Apollo Gallery in New York in the autumn.

In 1840, Bingham exhibited six paintings at the National Academy of Design in New York. By that time he was technically much more accomplished; already evident in these works is the flair for genre subjects, simple incidents of everyday life, which was to become his distinctive mark as an artist. He also decided to move to Washington, D.C., ambitious to try his skills painting federal politicians. He spent four years, off and on, in the capital, during which he painted portraits of important figures including John Quincy Adams and Daniel Webster. By this time, he was a painter of some modest reputation, but he had not produced any works of serious moment. Looking at his Self-Portrait of the Artist , which he had painted a few years earlier, it would be hard to guess that this square-jawed young man with the wide brow and the slight curl in his forelock, rather tentatively painted, would suddenly during the mid-1840’s produce paintings of considerable importance.

Life’s Work

It is, in the main, the painting that Bingham did roughly in the ten years between 1845 and 1855 that has given him his reputation as one of the foremost American artists. After that time, for several reasons, the quality of his art fell back into competent professionalism, with occasional paintings reminding the art world of his heights in what is called his “great genre period.” During this period, he continued to paint portraits, but his best work was in studies of simple life in Missouri, with special emphasis placed upon the world of the flatboatmen plying their hard trade on the Missouri River. He had anticipated the theme in his Western Boatmen Ashore during the late 1830’s, and during the 1840’s he found a market for the theme, rather surprisingly in New York.

The celebration of the simple life of the American plainsman, trapper, and boatman had already been prepared for in literature in the writing of Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Bingham, in a sense, was following the eastern painter William Sidney Mount in putting that growing admiration for the muscle and sweat of American frontier life into pictorial terms, but in his own way.

The American Art-Union in New York City was dedicated to supporting American artists through purchase, sale, and reproduction of their paintings, and in a seven-year period it purchased twenty paintings by Bingham, all of them examples of his genre themes.

Fur Traders Descending the Missouri was one of the first paintings so purchased, and it stunningly reveals the power of Bingham as a painter, which had never been revealed in his portrait work. It is, at one and the same time, his most powerful painting and the most representative of his studies of those singular men who, in working the river, seem to exemplify an admirable truth about American life. Variations on the theme were to occupy Bingham through the next ten years, and occasionally the theme was to catch the popular imagination in ways that Bingham could hardly have imagined.

If Fur Traders Descending the Missouri has a focused intensity that reminds viewers of Le Nain and slightly awes on sight, Bingham also had the ability to use the theme charmingly. The Jolly Flatboatmen , showing its simple subjects in a moment of dance and song, was engraved by the Art-Union and eighteen thousand copies were sent out to American homes. Part of the secret lay, undoubtedly, in Bingham’s fastidious choice of how he saw the humble boatmen. He eschewed the real vulgarity of their lives, the hard toil, the danger, for gentle, often humorous scenes of cardplaying or quiet moments of rest. He did not patronize them, but he did not tell all the story. The paintings of lively, unsentimental masculinity framed by the beauty of the western riverscapes brought out the best in Bingham, both as an artist and as a recorder of an aspect of American frontier life.

During the early 1850’s, he carried the taste for paintings of Missouri life a step further in his “Election” series. These were quite as popular as his studies of the working Westerners, and he spent considerable time not only in painting them but also in promoting the sales of the originals and of engravings of the same. As in his first series, he avoided adverse comment. William Hogarth’s famous election works may be seen as an influence, but while Hogarth was intent on satire, Bingham never was. Although the characters in these technically complicated paintings of speech-making, polling, and post-voting celebration may sometimes be less than proper, they are never savaged. A cheerful, sensitive appreciation of the democratic process in action, however makeshift it might be in the rural fastness of Missouri, was the dominant tone in these works, which brought Bingham praise for his appreciation of the American way of choosing their legislators.

However modest the topics of this period were, Bingham’s use of them was not unsophisticated. He displayed a strong sense of composition, a considerable talent for marshaling large groups of people, and a use of light and shadow that complemented the mood succinctly. His drawing was confident, and his settings appropriate and sometimes charming. He was no longer merely a journeyman painter.

Despite the support of the Art-Union, he was never as popular in the East as he was out West. There was constant sniping at his rude subjects and at his use of color. He quarreled with the Art-Union administrators over criticism of his work printed in their house journal and became dissatisfied with the prices they paid him for his paintings.

By the mid-1850’s, Bingham, dissatisfied with his career, was determined to move on to more important work. He had painted a Daniel Boone subject a few years earlier, and he saw the historical painting as the kind of theme that he wanted to pursue. He hoped to convince the federal government of the appropriateness of having a Boone painting, of major proportions, commissioned for the Capitol. A step in that direction came in the form of a commission from the state of Missouri to provide paintings of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, and in 1856, Bingham went to Europe to work on those paintings. He visited Paris but settled in Düsseldorf, then a center for painters and sculptors, and he completed his Washington and Jefferson there. Unfortunately, in the eyes of some critics, Düsseldorf, with its emphasis on high technical polish in painting, influenced Bingham adversely, and there is some informed opinion which sees a decline in the quality of his work dating from the Düsseldorf experience.

Bingham returned to Missouri with his commissions and was asked to provide two further paintings, one of Henry Clay and one of Andrew Jackson. Nevertheless, the hoped-for major commission from the government did not come, and he kept busy doing portraits until the Civil War broke out. Always interested and sometimes involved in politics as a Whig (Republican) supporter, he served from 1862 until 1865 as the state treasurer, painting as time permitted. Although an active supporter of the war against the South, he split with the party after the war over the excessive zeal with which Republicans conducted themselves; his painting Order 11 , not a particularly good example of his talents, got him into a continuing battle, because it illustrated the arrogance of the military during the war. It was one of the few occasions on which he used his talent to make political comment, and it did him little good.

Bingham continued to paint portraits, landscapes (which had always been least interesting to him), and genre topics, and to take a hand in Missouri politics. There was some desultory talk at one time of standing for governor, and he served as adjutant general during the 1870’s. In 1877, the University of Missouri made him its first professor of art, a post that seems to have been largely honorary; he had a studio on the campus but spent little time there. When he died in July, 1879, he was almost totally forgotten in the East but honored in Missouri as the state’s own painter, the “Missouri Artist.”

Significance

Despite the length of Bingham’s career, the amount of work he produced, his constant comings and goings between Missouri and the East, and the sales of his engravings and paintings, Bingham’s reputation in the main was confined principally to the Midwest, and he was patronized as a competent portraitist and a sometime regional genre artist.

After Bingham’s death he remained relatively unknown until 1917, when an article in Art World suggested that he was more than a simple hack. The first important confirmation of that idea came in 1933, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased Fur Traders Descending the Missouri. In 1934, the City Art Museum in St. Louis mounted the first major show of his works, and in 1935, the Museum of Modern Art in New York exhibited his work. Since then his reputation has been secure, but it is based, in the main, not upon his entire life’s work as a painter but on the output of that ten-year period between 1845 and 1855 when he was principally concerned with recording the working, social, and political lives of the native Missourians. He is recognized as the first master painter of the American West, and his political paintings are a vivid record of the brash, lively vitality of a world that he knew so well—not only as an artist but also as a participant.

Bingham’s reputation as a painter of serious quality, however, is centered on those brilliantly evocative paintings of trappers, flatboatmen, river people, and other simple citizens of the West, whom he sees with a stunningly poetic clarity that transcends the particularity of detail that he was so determined to record. Some critics have seen in this aesthetic aura touches of an American “luminism,” that quality that gives great paintings a universal ideality and connection with the “oneness” of all things. In those paintings, the truth of Bingham’s record of simple life goes beyond its factuality.

Bibliography

Baigell, Matthew. A History of American Painting. New York: Praeger, 1971. This book is theoretically less adventurous than the Novak work (see below), but it does, in a genial way, put Bingham into the American tradition, and that is where it is easiest to understand and appreciate him.

Bingham, George Caleb. An Address to the Public, Vindicating a Work of Art Illustrative of the Federal Military Policy in Missouri During the Late Civil War. Kansas City, Mo., 1871. Expresses Bingham’s conviction that it is the duty of the artist to make political use of his gift.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Art, the Ideal of Art and the Utility of Art.” In Public Lectures Delivered in the Chapel of the University of the State of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri, by Members of the Faculty, 1878-79, course 2, vol. 1, 311-324. Columbia, Mo.: Statesman Book and Job Print, 1879. One of Bingham’s rare statements about art and the role of the artist.

Bloch, E. Maurice. George Caleb Bingham. 2 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. The major study of Bingham’s work. Excellent illustration. Very careful discussion of his major paintings.

Larkin, Lew. Bingham, Fighting Artist: The Story of Missouri’s Immortal Painter, Patriot, Soldier, and Statesman. St. Louis: State Publishing, 1955. The title of the book may seem a bit fulsome, but Bingham was much more than simply a painter, and something less than a statesman. This book tries to bring the multiple lives of the man into context.

McDermott, John Francis. George Caleb Bingham: River Portraitist. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959. The title of this full-scale critical biography is misleading. It does, in fact, cover Bingham’s entire career, using specific paintings or groups of paintings as a critical focus, interspersed with details of his career and life. Good illustrations.

Novak, Barbara. American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience. New York: Praeger, 1969. This book is helpful in putting Bingham in the tradition of American painting in interesting ways. He has a chapter to himself, and his connections, implicit and explicit, to other painters are explored with much grace.

Rash, Nancy. The Painting and Politics of George Caleb Bingham. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991. Rash describes Bingham’s painting within the context of his political career to demonstrate how his art influenced and recorded the political and cultural life of his time.

Shapiro, Michael Edward, et al. George Caleb Bingham. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993. Five art historians analyze Bingham’s personality and art works, refuting the opinion that his simple and democratic paintings directly reflect his personality. Includes color plates and other illustrations.