Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
George Caleb Bingham
American; 19th-century
St. Louis, MO: Saint Louis Art Museum
78%
Raftsmen Playing Cards. 1847. Oil on canvas
In his river scenes, Bingham's foreground figures assert themselves against backdrops that are swallowingly indistinct, almost spectral. This painting is all form up front; the barge pushes back into formless nature, as if it's bringing order. But it's not order, exactly — look at the firewood, the strewn tools, the disheveled clothes. Rather, it's distinctness. Each of Bingham's objects (people included) is total and self-contained. The things he's painted may assort themselves in complicated ways, the space between them may swell with significance, but everything is firm, well-defined. (TFS, 2024)
New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art
72%
Fur Traders Descending the Missouri. 1845. Oil on canvas
In Bingham's best pictures there are these invisible forces — orb-like fields of power and influence — that manifest between his ever-interacting figures. This is a lesser work of his because, by and large, it lacks such dynamics (though they're somewhat there in the arc of the oarsman's back and the bend of both of his arms, and in the way he thereby seems prepped to catch and cradle the projectile energy of the boy leaning beside him). But Fur Traders is also among Bingham's better-painted canvases, with its vitreous play of reflections on river and the delicacy of its sky. The clouds above, as well as the smoke the old man's puffing, do that Frederick Kensett thing of stacking small amounts of very tangible paint atop a flat and perfectly illusionistic surface, such that the former is pulled backwards into the representation while the latter is made to seem more literal than it can really bear. This is by no means a slouchy Bingham, but nor is it his masterpiece. (TFS, 2026)
St. Louis, MO: Saint Louis Art Museum
72%
Jolly Flatboatmen in Port. 1857. Oil on canvas
Bingham should be faulted for all the elements of this painting that are not fully deployed: the unremarkable sky (which doesn't do much to distinguish the figures below it); the wedge of river (which is too simply an inversion of the foreground's pyramid of human action); the building/steamboat repoussoir (which is a little flatly functional). But then there's everything that's working. For one, the central figure group is unified despite how much stuff makes it up — a dozen figures arranged concentrically that still manage, despite how bounded and linear each one is, to build to a firm solid whole. Then there's the modeling, which is classic Bingham. See it in that greenbacked sitter's hat, just below the center of the painting: it looks like it could be peeled off the painting's surface without disturbing a thing around it, and yet it's integral to, say, the barreltops or the way the dancer twirls his kerchief. Like this hat, objects here — bodies, barrels, hats, boats — are all at once worlds to themselves and integral parts of the world around them. This is what makes Bingham's paintings worth seeing. (TFS, 2025)