George Caleb Bingham
Fur Traders Descending the Missouri
George Caleb Bingham at the Metropolitan Museum ‘Navigating the West: George Caleb Bingham and the River’ is the first major Bingham exhibition in more than 25 years. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, June 17–September 20, 2015.]]>
Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art
Bingham (1811–1879) was the first major American artist to be based west of the Mississippi River. He would pursue the duel careers of artist and politician, serving in elected positions for four decades. His family moved from Virginia—where Bingham was born—to the Missouri Territory in 1819, several years before it became a state. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, Missouri remained at the edge of the American frontier, a departure point for explorers, adventurers, and pioneers heading west. Largely self-taught, Bingham relied on drawing manuals rather than formal academic study for instruction. He began his career as an itinerant portrait painter, traveling to counties along the Missouri River portraying middle-class citizens.
Following this early period, Bingham focused his paintings on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, celebrating their critically important role as major arteries of transportation and agents of cultural and economic change for the country. He also identified and codified a wide variety of Western character types—boatman, card player, dockhand, fiddler, fur trader, raftman, and weary traveler, among others—and brought them to national attention. Through his paintings, he promoted romantic evocations of the West to a primarily urban, eastern audience.
A highlight of the exhibition will be Bingham’s most highly regarded painting, “Fur Traders Descending the Missouri”. In this classically balanced, strongly horizontal composition, a French trapper slowly paddles his canoe down the river; his half-European half-Native American son leans across their cargo, and a black bear cub is leashed to the bow. The artist’s brilliant distillation and paring down of compositional elements create a startling stillness.
The exhibition will also feature the artist’s most recognized composition —”The Jolly Flatboatmen” (1846)— which portrays a harmonious environment around a crew of frolicking boatmen playing music and dancing as they drifted downriver on a flatboat full of goods.
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NGA Washington buys Bingham’s ‘The Jolly Flatboatmen’ (news, May 2015)
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