George Caleb Bingham

Raised in the Missouri River town of Franklin, Missouri, George Caleb Bingham was one of the first major American artists to hail from America’s frontier, and the first to make the West the subject of his art. As a child Bingham assisted portrait painter Chester Harding (1792–1866) in his studio. He began his own artistic career painting political banners and working as an itinerant portraitist in his home state. Essentially self-taught, he established a portrait studio in Washington, D.C., but he returned to Missouri in 1844 in search of commissions by which to support his growing family. Around this time, however, he turned his attention increasingly to painting scenes of everyday life along the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, including several variations on his “jolly flatboatmen” theme.

Bingham elevated his region’s colorful character types into the subject of high art just as frontier themes were enjoying unprecedented popularity among Eastern art consumers. In 1847 an engraving of Bingham’s first version of The Jolly Flatboatmen was widely distributed by the American Art-Union, which purchased several of his Western genre paintings. In addition to river scenes, Bingham also depicted local political life drawn from direct experience: his contested bid for a seat in the Missouri legislature in 1846 was the beginning of his career in state politics as a member of the Whig Party. Bingham exhibited his art and traveled widely, studying and working in Düsseldorf, Germany, in the late 1850s, but he maintained an artistic as well as a political presence in Missouri. He worked from studios in St. Louis, Kansas City, and other Missouri locales; in 1877, two years before his death, he was appointed a professor of art at the University of Missouri at Columbia.