Жорж Калеб Бингем: Миссури суретшісінің өмірі мен шығармашылығы

American artist (1811–1879)

George Caleb Bingham (March 20, 1811 – July 7, 1879) was an American artist, soldier and politician known in his lifetime as "the Missouri Artist". Initially a Whig, he was elected as a delegate to the Missouri legislature before the American Civil War where he fought against the extension of slavery westward. During that war, although born in Virginia, Bingham was dedicated to the Union cause and became captain of a volunteer company which helped keep the state from joining the Confederacy, and then served four years as Missouri's Treasurer. During his final years, Bingham held several offices in Kansas City, while also serving as Missouri's Adjutant General. His paintings of American frontier life along the Missouri River exemplify the Luminist style.

Born on a farm in Augusta County, Virginia, George Caleb Bingham was the second of seven children that Mary Amend (1789–1851) bore with her husband Henry Vest Bingham (1784–1823). Upon their marriage, Mary's father Matthias Amend gave the Binghams ownership of the family mill, land, and several slaves with the agreement that Matthias could live with the family for the rest of his life. Henry Bingham offered the land and mill as surety for a friend's debt and, when the friend died in 1818, all was lost. In 1819, the Bingham family (including grandfather Amend) moved to Franklin, Missouri, on the Missouri River near the state's center as well as the eastern terminus of the Santa Fe Trail, "where the land was said to be bountiful, fertile and cheap." George Bingham was initially educated by his mother, and self taught as an artist. His sole childhood exposure to a working artist was as a nine year old boy, when famed American portraitist Chester Harding visited Franklin looking for business, having recently sketched Daniel Boone in Warren County, Missouri (Boone's sons owned a salt spring and manufactured salt in Howard County). George assisted Harding during his brief stay, an experience that left a powerful impression. Mary Bingham opened a school for girls on the farmstead. George, then twelve, worked as the school janitor, and later received some art tutoring when the school hired Mattie Wood as an art teacher. By age nineteen, Bingham was painting portraits for $20.00 apiece, often completing the works in a single day. He found clients in Howard and Saline counties and nearby areas. Though his painting abilities were still developing, he impressed his patrons by strong draftsmanship as well as his native ability to capture his subject's likeness, and he was able to support himself by this work by 1833. Soon Bingham was ready to travel to St. Louis to ply his trade, but contracted measles. The illness left him weak and permanently bald. By 1838, Bingham had established a studio in St. Louis, the state's major city (Jefferson City, also on the Missouri River and nearer his home, was the state capital), and was beginning to make a name as a portrait artist. Several prominent local citizens visited his studio for portraits, including the lawyer James S. Rollins of Columbia, Missouri, who became a lifelong friend as well as a powerful politician in the state. While Bingham frequently worked in St. Louis, he kept his principal residence in Arrow Rock for years. Bingham then decided to try formal education in the east, and moved with his young wife to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he spent three years studying art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, including a trip to New York City to visit the National Academy of Design exhibition. Bingham ran for election as a Whig to the Missouri House of Representatives the following year. He appeared to have won in 1846 by 3 votes, but lost in a recount. In a reprise of the election in 1848, Bingham won the seat by a decisive margin, becoming one of the few artists to serve in elected political office. He actively opposed the pro slavery "Jackson resolutions" in 1849, although their proponent was also a resident of Saline County. He would also represent Missouri's eighth district at the Whig National Convention in June 1852. Bingham's political interests would be reflected in his vivid paintings of frontier political life. In 1856, two years after the tumultuous creation of the Kansas Territory, Bingham traveled to Europe for an extensive tour with his second wife Eliza and youngest daughter. First they stayed in Paris for several months, where Bingham fulfilled a long cherished desire and studied the Old Masters at the Louvre Museum, likely his chief reason for going abroad. They went on to Düsseldorf, Germany, where they lived until 1859, taking part in the Düsseldorf school of painting. Bingham lived and worked among the American and German artists of the art colony, among whom was the German American Emanuel Leutze, the most prominent historical painter in the United States. (Washington Crossing the Delaware was then his most famous work.) Leutze was unusual for living in both countries and had an open studio in Düsseldorf, where he welcomed Bingham as a friend and already successful artist. While in Germany, Bingham worked on important commissions from the Missouri State Legislature of Presidents Washington and Jefferson (later destroyed by fire), as well as independent paintings.

Bingham returned to America after the death of his wife's father in 1859. In 1875, the governor appointed Bingham as Adjutant General of Missouri, so thereafter he was often referred to as "General Bingham". Toward the end of his life, although quite ill, Bingham was appointed the first Professor of Art at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, which his friend Major Rollins and the Rollins family helped found. He met with only a few students before his death; among them was Amanda Austin.

One of Bingham's most famous paintings, this work is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Painted around 1845 in the style called luminism by some historians of American art, it was originally entitled, French Trader, Half breed Son. The American Art Union thought the title potentially controversial and renamed it when it was first exhibited. It reflected the reality of fur trappers and traders frequently marrying Native American women in their territories; in Canada the ethnic Métis people have been recognized by the government as a distinct group with status similar to First Nations. The painting is haunting for its evocation of an era in American history—note, in particular, the liberty cap worn by the older man. A black fox seated at the front of the boat is secured by a chain.

Bingham's Election Series comprises three paintings: The County Election, Stump Speaking, and The Verdict of the People. Bingham intended for the Election Series to reach a national audience rather than Missourians alone. To spread his idea of free people and free institutions, Bingham exhibited his paintings in Washington and urged the Library Committee of Congress to purchase them so American leaders could view them. When the Library Committee of Congress decided to not purchase his trio, he lent the paintings to the Mercantile Library Association in St. Louis. The County Election depicts a variety of people from several different social classes, such as young boys playing a game, two men talking about the election happening around them, and a mass of men walking up the stairs to vote. A banner shows the words, "The Will of the People[,] The Supreme Law", a credo that had great meaning for Bingham. He believed that people had a right to share their ideas; he also believed that he lost his seat in legislature in 1846 due to the improper following of the people's will. In his first painting of The County Election, Bingham showed two men flipping a coin beneath a judge. The two people represent ex governor Marmaduke's bet that he had placed on the election of Bingham versus his opponent, Erasmus Sappington. Bingham also purposefully kept the scene outside to represent universal suffrage, one of his beliefs. The openness of the setting shows that politics should happen in the open rather than behind the curtains of the government. The idea of universal suffrage agrees with Bingham's ideas of the will of the people: every white man should have the right to vote because the will of the people should be the supreme law. The reference to Marmaduke in The County Election was only relative to Missouri, so in order to generalize the message of the painting to the nation, Bingham removed the two men tossing a coin in the print version. Within Bingham's painting Stump Speaking, he creates a scene that has both a national message and a local message; some of the people portrayed in the paintings resemble local Missouri politicians. Behind the speaker sits a man resembling Bingham's self portrait taking notes about the speech, waiting for his turn to speak. The "Stump Speaker" resembled Sappington, who was Bingham's opponent in his previous elections, include: Horse Thief (a political allegory posing the question of U. S. Constitutional law versus Vigilantism in the Western regions of the U. S.), Baiting the Hook (Bingham's first river genre), Young Fisherman, Hudson River Palisades (Bingham's only known Hudson River painting); and portraits including Colin Dunlop & His Dog, Lewis Allen Dicken Crenshaw, Fanny Smith Crenshaw, Frederick Moss Prewitt, Civil War Lt. Col. Levi Pritchard (Bingham's largest portrait at 80 inches high), Charles Chilton, Samuel Chilton, Thomas B. Hudson, Missouri Steamboat Capt. Joseph Kinney and Martha Lykins, a previously unidentified woman who has now been recognized as Bingham's third wife, painted years before their marriage. The GCBCRS is built upon and continues E. Maurice Bloch's authoritative George Caleb Bingham Catalogue Raisonné of paintings and drawings, begun in the 1940s, which includes Bingham's known paintings up to 1986 (Bloch died in 1989). All 23 paintings authenticated by the GCBCRS Committee were unknown to Bloch. Nearly all Bingham's over 500 recorded paintings (460 are portraits) are unsigned, including famous ones such as Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, The Emigration of Daniel Boone, and The County Election. Bingham neglected record keeping and signing, allowing scores of paintings to remain unidentified. The GCBCRS is sponsored by Rachael Cozad Fine Art in Kansas City with publication in book form planned for the near future.