George Caleb Bingham

George Caleb Bingham. , One of America's greatest painters, George Caleb Bingham, was known during his lifetime as "the Missouri Artist" for his depictions of frontier life and portraits., Bingham was born in Augusta County, Virginia, March 20, 1811, and in 1819 the family moved to Franklin, across the Missouri River from Boonville. From 1828 to 1832 he was apprenticed to Justinian Williams, a Boonville Methodist minister, cabinetmaker, and carpenter. While an apprentice he did a portrait of local lawyer Washington Adams and painted a sign of Daniel Boone for the Judge Dade Hotel. Many more portrait commissions followed. He married his first wife, Sarah Elizabeth Hutchinson, in Boonville in 1836. She died in 1848. He remarried in 1849; his second wife died in 1876. He remarried in 1878 and she survived., After six years in St. Louis and four in Washington, D.C., he returned to Missouri and in 1845 painted Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, regarded as his masterpiece. For the next twelve years many important works followed. His best genre paintings portrayed life on the river, such as The Jolly Flatboatmen (1846) and Raftsmen Playing Cards (1847), and his great series of political paintings, typified by The County Election (1851), Stump Speaking (1853), and Verdict of the People (1855)., Bingham, the politician, served as state treasurer during the Civil War and as Missouri's adjutant general (1875-1876). Though a Unionist, Bingham disapproved of the harsh treatment of pro-Southern citizens, portraying the cruelty in a large theatrical painting entitled Order No. 11, or Martial Law (1865-1870). From 1877-79 he was the University of Missouri's first professor of art. He died July 7, 1879, in Kansas City and is buried in Union Cemetery.