George Caleb Bingham and the Self Taught Artist

Fur Trappers Descending The Missouri by George Caleb Bingham

2011 is the bicentennial of George Bingham’s birth. His home in Missouri is a National Historic Landmark and the George Caleb Bingham Catalogue Raisonné Supplement Of Paintings & Drawings announced to the world that they had authenticated ten previously unknown Bingham paintings. That he is now considered one of America’s important painters of the 19th century and is known as the premier painter of America’s Manifest Destiny is quite remarkable considering that in his day he was known as a portrait painter and was completely forgotten for close to a century.

His greatest paintings were not his bread-and-butter portraits but his rather remarkable genre paintings that captured a fleeting period of American history, a time when our country was no longer bottled up along the Atlantic shore but was not yet quite tearing itself to bits over slavery. His colors are bright and joyous and his best work feeds off of the luscious glow of the Luminists. His subjects of his genre work are riverboat men, stevedores, frontier town politicians and the road weary pioneers. No one really captured these people in the present tense and even if some of them had already faded into history by the time he conceived his work, it was still to soon to call it the past. So much of this was not visually known to America until Bingham painted it.

All of this came about from his home along the Missouri River. At first, his family lived in Virginia, where they had inherited a mill and land but George’s father lost it all when he co-signed a loan for a friend who soon passed away. Struggling, the Binghams did as so many other Americans did at that time, leave for the west. The family settled only 85 miles short of Independence, Missouri, along the Missouri River. At Arrow Rock, the river’s wide and a little shallow, but it occasionally rages and lots of flotsam floats down the river. Men with poles and shallow draft boats pushed up and down the river, carrying all manner of cargo between St. Louis and Independence. Bingham saw his share of the river life as a curious nine-year-old boy. He also saw Chester Harding, a respected portrait painter, come through the area. A traveling artist was quite a novelty in a frontier town and he caught his share of attention. George helped him in his work and, in return, Bingham caught the art bug. By the time he was in his teens, he was painting local people. By the time he was twenty, Bingham had apprenticed as a cabinetmaker and had considered preaching as a vocation, but he ended up painting portraits in St. Louis.

“Self-Taught” is a vague, dangerous word in art. Art is torn between the desire to train artists in the latest novel trends and the need to find fresh ideas that reinterpret and even destroy the latest trends. This yin and yang between the secret academic world of the latest artistic knowledge and the future that could be divined by a collection of fools on the street make artistic education and inspiration a delicate balancing act that seems as ephemeral as the weather. Bingham was self-taught but he was also self-motivated. At the suggestion of supporters, he traveled to Philadelphia, where he visited the Pennsylvania School of Art, and then New York City, where he visited the National Academy of Design. Years later, he would visit Europe and spend time at both the Louvre and the Dusseldorf Academy. While he probably did not take classes, he studied the works of the Old Masters and talked to artists and teachers, with much of it enlightening his artistic development.

Bingham made his way by painting portraits. Much of it, although well produced, seems very derivative of the portraits styles of the day: well dressed men and women soberly posing against a dark, nondescript background. It’s his other work, the genre paintings that celebrate the pioneer spirit of Missouri and the Midwest that really captures everyone’s heart. His most famous work is Fur Trappers Descending The Missouri, an incredible moment in time captured like a snapshot. A fur trapper, maybe a voyageur, as well as his son, stares at us in suspended animation as they slowly drift downstream. The clouds, the haze, the river and its flotsam, the fur trappers an even that animal that art historians argue over as to whether it’s a cat or a bear cub, are all frozen in this Luminist atmosphere that hangs over the river. The evening glow that envelopes both the sky, the land and the river create a scene that seems to project both a light, serene beauty and a sense of it’s heavy, sultry atmosphere.

The painting was sold to the American Art Union and this, too, reflected the severe divide that separated those who knew from those who learn as they go along. The Union was a subscription art group of national reputation. It collected fees and displayed and sold the work of many talented American artists but it was snubbed by the artistic elite. The Union would figuratively crash and burn within a few decades but the work of some if it’s members would become the art that America now remembers as 19th century America. Bingham, on the other hand, would remain forgotten until the Metropolitan Museum Of Art in New York purchased the work around the time of the Depression and put it on display.

Other works of Fine Art you may enjoy:

The Connections Of Mary Cassatt

Bend In the River, an oil painting

Silence In the City, a cityscape painting