George Caleb Bingham

George Caleb Bingham (March 20, 1811 – July 7, 1879) is recognized as one of the most important American artists of the 19th century. Known in his lifetime as “the Missouri artist,” he is distinguished among the first generation of painters of the early American West for classic narrative scenes drawn from his observation and experience. His most famous paintings chronicle America’s westward expansion and depict life along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers.

Rendered in the style of “genre painting,” Bingham’s works capture the unique aspects of the American frontier with themes of community engagement, leisure, and river life before the steamboat era. His Fur Traders Descending the Missouri (1845, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) is a renowned example of Bingham’s genre paintings, containing a colorful cast of characters and scenes imbued with layers of symbolism and socio-political commentary. Today, Bingham’s paintings portraying fur trappers, riverboat men, fishermen, politicians and frontier settlers are considered national treasures and can be viewed as vivid historical records of the politics, commerce and social relations of everyday life of the American frontier.

His paintings are held in important private and museum collections, notably: National Gallery of Art; National Portrait Gallery; Wadsworth Atheneum; Amon Carter Museum of American Art; Saint Louis Art Museum, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum; and The White House. He was also a prolific portrait artist, producing as many as 500 portraits depicting numerous pioneering Missourians, important politicians from the state, as well as famous figures such as John Quincy Adams, the sixth US president who served from 1825 to 1829, and Senator Daniel Webster. All of Bingham’s known paintings, including recently discovered works, are compiled in the George Caleb Bingham Catalogue Raisonné, a public-access electronic catalogue launched in 2018 that builds on the work of 20th century American art scholar E. Maurice Bloch (1916 -1989). In 1986 Bloch published The Paintings of George Caleb Bingham: A Catalogue Raisonné