George Caleb Bingham (1811–1879)

George Caleb Bingham was born in Augusta County, Virginia, in 1811, and moved with his family to Kansas City, Missouri, in 1819. He began his career as a portrait painter, working in Missouri, Virginia, and Washington, D. C. His success as an artist came with the ebullient genre paintings of life on the Western frontier that he began to exhibit during the 1840s. He also painted satirical political scenes, which were informed by his service in the Missouri State Legislature and his involvement in the Whig party. After studying in Düsseldorf, Germany, from 1856 to 1859, Bingham continued to paint and take part in Missouri politics.

The 1845 exhibition of the American Art-Union was a turning point in George Caleb Bingham’s career. A lottery system in which subscribers from across the country made possible the purchase and distribution of American paintings, the Art-Union was a godsend to artists like Bingham, who lacked sufficient patronage and exposure, when it opened in 1839. Probably encouraged by the Art-Union’s stated goal of selecting works “illustrative of American scenery and American manners,” the portrait painter Bingham took up these unfamiliar subjects, submitting two landscapes and two genre scenes.

One of these paintings, Fur Traders Descending the Missouri (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), is now considered a masterpiece of American genre painting. Together with what is probably its pendant, The Concealed Enemy (Stark Museum of Art, Orange, Texas), it offered a vision of life on the Western frontier during Bingham’s childhood in Missouri. The landscapes, Cottage Scenery (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) and our Landscape: Rural Scenery, conveyed the environment in which settlers like his own family lived. Northeastern audiences were eager to see such images, and following his success in 1845, Bingham continued to paint the Western frontier scenes for which he is best known today.

Like many early American landscape painters, Bingham emulated the style of late eighteenth-century English artists. The Englishman George Morland’s prints of cottage scenes informed the composition and mood of Cottage Scenery, while in Landscape: Rural Scenery, the silhouetted branches and foliage patterns show the influence of the English-born artist Joshua Shaw, whom Bingham may have met in Philadelphia.[1] Despite his English stylistic sources, Bingham conveyed the unadulterated character of the early American landscape and the simple conditions in which settlers lived. The bright blue sky and the presence of the figures washing in the river suggest a harmonious relationship between the settlers and the wilderness that surrounds them.

Bingham’s works can be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Brooklyn Museum, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Corcoran Gallery of Art and the White House, Washington, D. C.; Manoogian Collection, Detroit; Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago; and the Saint Louis Art Museum.

[1] Bingham may have met Shaw during his trips to Philadelphia in 1838 and 1843, and he certainly saw Shaw’s landscapes exhibited there. The foliage in Cottage Scenery also resembles Shaw’s, and the subject and composition of The Concealed Enemy relate to several of Shaw’s Indian subjects. See E. Maurice Bloch, George Caleb Bingham, vol .1, The Evolution of an Artist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 111, 178-79, 178n21, and Henry Adams, “A New Interpretation of Bingham’s Fur Traders Descending the Missouri,” Art Bulletin 65, no. 4 (December 1983), 679. For a differing view, see Elizabeth Johns, “The ‘Missouri Artist’ as Artist,” in George Caleb Bingham, exh. cat. (Saint Louis: The Saint Louis Museum of Art, 1990), 100.