George Caleb Bingham

The painter of American frontier life on the Missouri River and the Mississippi, and one of the first artists to treat the culture of the trans-Appalachian West as a subject worthy of the full attention of serious painting. Bingham was born in Virginia and moved as a child to Franklin, Missouri, on the Missouri River, where he grew up among the fur traders, flatboatmen and political crowds he would later paint. He was largely self-taught as a painter, with brief periods of study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and early in his career worked as a portrait painter for hire across Missouri and Washington, D.C. His reputation rests primarily on a series of genre scenes produced in the 1840s and 1850s: Fur Traders Descending the Missouri (1845), Jolly Flatboatmen (1846), Raftsmen Playing Cards (1847), The County Election (1852). These paintings were widely distributed through the American Art-Union, which sold subscriptions and distributed engravings after original paintings to thousands of members across the country; his work reached more Americans than that of any previous artist. The flatboatmen gliding through the morning mist of the Missouri, the political crowds at county elections, the workers playing cards on the raft — these images became defining pictures of what frontier democratic life looked like. Bingham also had a political career: he served in the Missouri state legislature, worked as state treasurer, and was appointed by President Grant as Adjutant General of Missouri. His later history paintings dealing with the violence of the Civil War border period — Order No. 11 (1865–68), depicting Union soldiers expelling Missouri civilians — are as powerful as the genre scenes but less widely known. He died in Kansas City in 1879.