George Caleb Bingham(1811 – 1879)

The County Election

c. 1852

George Caleb Bingham was a Missouri artist and politician.

During his lifetime, he was known as “the Missouri Artist.”

Painting his most significant pieces between 1845 and 1860, Bingham produced many remarkable drawings, portraits, landscapes, and scenes of social and political life on the frontier.

He was also active in civic affairs and contributed to the political life of Missouri before and after the Civil War.

George Caleb Bingham was born on March 20, 1811, in Augusta County, Virginia.

He was the second of seven children born to Henry Vest and Mary Amend Bingham.

Living on a large farm, George showed a strong interest in drawing at an early age. He supposedly drew on the sides of barns, fence posts, and the walls of the family mill.

When George was seven, his father lost most of the family’s property to cover a friend’s debts.

Homeless, George left Virginia with his parents, five siblings, his grandfather Matthias Amend, and their slaves.

They headed to Missouri to build a new life.

George Bingham’s family settled in Franklin,

a village on the banks of the Missouri River.

It was the summer of 1819 and his parents were quick to contribute to their new community.

His father opened an inn called the Square and Compass.

He also started a tobacco factory, bought farmland, and became a civic leader.

Bingham’s mother was an educated woman and soon started a school for girls, one of the first west of the Mississippi River.

When George was nine, a painter named Chester Harding came to Franklin and stayed at their inn.

Harding was finishing a portrait of Daniel Boone.

George became Harding’s helper. He stood at Harding’s side and watched him paint the famous pioneer’s portrait.

By observing closely, George learned the basics of portrait painting.

Chester Harding (1792–1866)

In 1820, Harding was working in St. Louis, Missouri. After he heard that the famed pioneer Daniel Boone lived in the area, Harding set out to find him.

Harding made the trip to St. Charles County and found Boone living several miles off the beaten path in an old block house.

Boone agreed to sit for Chester Harding. Harding’s portrait was the only one painted during Boone¹s lifetime.

While working on the portrait, Harding reportedly asked Daniel Boone if he had ever been lost. Boone replied, “No, I can’t say as ever I was lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.”

This quote is often used in biographies of Daniel Boone. This was the portrait Harding was finishing when young George Caleb Bingham met him in Franklin, Missouri.

After Harding created this famous portrait of

Daniel Boone from life, he completed two more portraits based on the first one.

Many images of Daniel Boone are based on these three paintings by Harding.

In late 1823, life changed once again for George. His father died of malaria, and his mother was left with many unpaid bills.

She had to give up their Franklin home and properties and move her family across the river to the Bingham farm in Saline County.

Here, near the village of Arrow Rock, she raised her artistic son and his siblings.

She continued to run her school and employed an art teacher, Mattie Wood, who also gave George art lessons.

When George was not studying, he helped his mother on their farm and at the school.

http://shs.umsystem.edu/famousmissourians/artists/bingham/bingham4a.html

Becoming an Artist

In 1827 sixteen-year-old George Caleb Bingham left Arrow Rock to learn a trade in Boonville, Missouri.

He worked for a cabinetmaker who was also a preacher. Bingham liked talking about religious and political issues and soon gained experience as both a preacher and a lawyer.

He also started painting portraits.

In the days before photography, many people were eager to have likenesses of loved ones.

Bingham began painting his friends’ faces. They admired his work, and soon Bingham felt confident enough to travel to other towns in Missouri and paint portraits of citizens who could afford to pay him.

By 1833 Bingham was earning his living as a portrait painter.

In 1834, while painting in Columbia, Bingham met James S. Rollins, an attorney and politician.

The two formed a close and long-lasting friendship. Rollins often gave Bingham advice and financial support.

Bingham’s letters to Rollins reveal much about their relationship as well as Bingham’s life as a painter and politician.

George Caleb Bingham was five feet, eight inches tall and weighed about 150 pounds.

When he was a young man, Bingham became very ill with a disease similar to small pox.

It left his face pockmarked and caused him to lose his hair.

He wore a wig for the rest of his life.

George Caleb Bingham

Before long, Bingham craved more instruction in art. In 1838 he traveled east to study the canvases of other artists.

Bingham was impressed especially by the genre paintings he saw. These paintings showed scenes from everyday life.

After studying in Philadelphia and making art contacts in New York City, Bingham returned to Missouri with more artistic skill and some new ideas about what he could paint.

Painting Frontier LifeGrowing up along the Missouri River,

Bingham had vivid mental pictures of life on the river.

He knew the people and their occupations firsthand.

In 1845 Bingham turned to this subject matter and began an important and productive period of his artistic career.

While he still traveled extensively, painting portraits to support his family, Bingham started painting genre scenes that showed life on the frontier.

When he shipped four of these paintings to the American Art-Union in New York, he began a profitable seven-year association with them.

During this period, Bingham produced works that made him one of America's greatest genre painters.

Watching the Cargo, c.1849

His familyGeorge Caleb Bingham married three times and had six

children; only two of his children outlived him. Bingham’s first wife was Sarah Elizabeth Hutchinson

(1819-1848), whom he married in September 1836. Together they had five children: Isaac Newton (1837-1841), Nathaniel (1840), Horace (1841-1869), Clara (1844-1901), and Joseph Hutchinson (1848).

After Elizabeth died in 1848, Bingham married Eliza Thomas (1828-1876) of Columbia on December 3, 1849. Together they had one son, James Rollins (1861-1910), whom they named after the artist’s friend.

Not long after Eliza’s death in 1876, Bingham married Mattie Livingston Lykins (1824-1890), a widow and family friend from Kansas City. They married on June 18, 1878.

Sarah Elizabeth Hutchinson and son Newton

Eliza Thomas Bingham

James Rollins Bingham, around 1870

The Painter as Politician Throughout his life, Bingham held strong

beliefs about democracy and politics in America.

He often used his artistic skills to portray his political views.

As early as 1840, Bingham sketched and painted artful political banners for his political party, the Whigs.

During his career, he also painted notable political figures such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and Senator Thomas Hart Benton.

Bingham’s paintings that focus on political campaigning and elections are some of his most important compositions.

They show democracy at work, with all its strengths, weaknesses, and complexities.

John Quincy Adams

Bingham did not just paint his political views.

He also ran for office and served in both elected and appointed positions during his lifetime.

In 1846 Bingham was elected by a narrow margin to the Missouri legislature, but his opponent successfully contested the outcome and took the office.

Bingham was eventually elected to represent Saline County in 1848 and represented Missouri's eighth district at the Whig National Convention in June 1852.

During the Civil War, Bingham sided with the Union. First he served as a captain in the U.S. Volunteer Reserve Corps. Then he worked as state treasurer in the provisional government in Jefferson City from 1862 to 1865.

One of his most important political paintings, however, came out of his personal outrage over the actions of a Union general.

Martial Law or Order No. 11 is a politically charged canvas that Bingham spent years promoting after he completed it in 1868.

Martial Law or Order No. 11

In 1875, he served in his last political post as Missouri’s adjutant general.

At the end of his life, Bingham became the first professor of art at the University of Missouri.

Bingham is famous for his images of frontier life and commerce along the great Missouri and the Mississippi Rivers.

In works such as Fur Traders Descending the Missouri (1845) and The Jolly Flatboatmen (1846),

He endeavored to capture and memorialize a way of life that—despite its manifest energy and vitality—was vanishing before his eyes.

Bingham's LegacyInterest in Bingham and his artwork faded

after his death on July 7, 1879, in Kansas City.

In 1933, however, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York bought Fur Traders Descending the Missouri. This purchase sparked interest in Bingham’s work.

Fur Traders Descending the Missouri

The Jolly Flatboatmen

The St. Louis Art Museum organized a major exhibition of his work in 1934, and Missouri artist Thomas Hart Benton promoted him.

Bingham’s drawings and paintings have since been given careful attention, and today he is considered one of America’s greatest and most popular painters.

Martial Law, or Order No. 11 c.1865-1868

Examine the architecture of the Missouri State Capital Building in the next slide.

What do you recognize?

Missouri State Capitol in Jefferson City, around 1848

• Every four years American citizens go to the polls to elect a president of the United States.

• At the same time, they will vote for a whole slate of state and local officials.

• The artist grew up on the Missouri frontier during the period when Andrew Jackson and his party dominated American political life.

• Jackson is one of the few presidents whose name is used to characterize a whole era in American history.

• Bingham however belonged to the Whig party, which was founded in opposition to the Democratic policies of Jackson.

• Bingham made speeches in support of the Presidential candidate William Henry Harrison.

• He also ran for office himself as a Whig candidate several times.

• In "The County Election," Bingham created another quaint scene which conveyed the ideal of the simple and modest life of 19th-century American communities.

 

• In a series of three election paintings, of which The County Election is the best known, he endeavored to capture the robust dynamics of the young republic's electoral process so that in his own words, "our social and political characteristics . . . will not be lost in the lapse of time for lack of an art record rendering them full justice.”

• Bingham even went so far as to turn the County Election and one of its companion pieces, Stump Speaking , into colored engravings, which could be widely disseminated across the nation.

• A full scale copy of The County Election was taken on tour of the South in order to raise subscriptions for the engraving.

• The County Election depicts the 1850 election in Saline County, Missouri, when Bingham ran against E.D. Sappington;

• and the artist's affection for—and his ability to see humor in—America's democratic process is present everywhere.

• However, there were significant differences between the general voting process then and now, as well as different practices among the states.

19th Century American Elections• Elections in mid-nineteenth century

America were not conducted as they are today.

1. The ballot was not secret, 2. precinct workers were not kept at a

distance from the polls, and 3. in the case of Missouri, the voting

lasted for three days.4. A man could vote in any township in

the county, but he had to swear that he had not and would not vote elsewhere.

5. The voting rights of African American men and of women were not guaranteed until the passage of the 13th and 15th Amendments decades later. The 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote.

• Despite the fact that the electorate is exclusively made up of white men, there is great diversity of human types in the crowd.

• Bingham, as a friend of his noted, "left nothing out: the courtier, the politician, the laborer, the sturdy farmer, the bully at the poles, the beer seller, the bruised pugilist."

1. the courtier,

2. the politician,

3. the laborer,

4. the sturdy farmer,

5. the bully at the poles,

6. the beer seller,

7. the bruised pugilist."

• In The County Election, we see and can almost hear the high-spirited hubbub of a festival as townsmen and plain farmers argue, converse, and call out greetings.

• There is no after-dark, back-room politics here, but many wry observations are made by the artist.

• Although the democratic faith in the judgment of the common man,

"The will of the people is the supreme law,"

is printed on the bright blue standard that divides the background landscape from the action around the polls, this device leans precariously against the far column of the porch.

• It is not by accident that Bingham has located his Democratic rival, represented as an unctuous vote-getter tipping his shiny top hat to a voter, directly below what was a common Jacksonian slogan, while the artist, dressed in muted browns sits on the lowest porch step, perhaps quietly sketching or writing out his platform for two interested onlookers.

• Alcohol played a major role in frontier America, and Bingham is not hesitant to show its effects in election-day politics.

• A plump, broadly smiling man in the left foreground holds his glass to be filled with hard cider— a favorite tool for attracting voters to candidates' sides.

• Liquor seems to have already

overwhelmed the individual behind him, who is being dragged, barely conscious, to the polls.

• Violence—the result of the heady concoction of liquor, high spirits, physical coercion, and political argument is indicated by the battered fellow on a bench in the far right foreground.

• The power of money and chance is symbolized by the toss of a coin directly below the swearing in,

• —in the midst of all the commotion—two boys play a game of throwing a knife into the ground.

• One critic noted these details and wrote that the picture defamed one of the most valuable of our political institutions.

• He was expecting a straight-laced civics lesson, not an insider's view on the electoral process

• Although confusion seems to reign, the painting's composition is carefully constructed along a main diagonal that begins with a voter being sworn in on the porch and ends at the foot of the boy and laughing drinker in the left foreground.

• Moreover, every figure in The County Election has been carefully thought out and rendered with firm clarity.

• In the large groups of his Election Series, Bingham achieved his finest and most ambitious composition and characterizations.

• In the words of a friend of Bingham, the

painting helps us to appreciate that …

"the elective franchise is the very corner stone, upon which rests our governmental superstructure and as illustrative of our fine institutions, the power and influence which the ballot box exerts over our happiness as a people . . . .“

• In some sense these works of Bingham are the forerunners of the public service ads which we see during an election cycle urging us to get out and vote and reminding us that on election day the sovereignty of the people is made palpable to the entire country and the world.

• While some men seem to cluster in

important debates regarding the election at hand, others sit on the outskirts of the scene, lazily observing the commotion.

• Children and pets play in the dust of theunpaved street, seemingly oblivious of the election and the excitement it induces.

• A Series of Drawings

Before he began this painting, Bingham sketched several models in various poses.

• Telling the Story

After Bingham completed the series of drawings, he transferred the figures on the canvas, grouping them to tell the story of the election.

• Creating the Painting

After he had all the drawings in place, Bingham painted each figure and filled in the other details of the scene.

• County Election, Bingham presents a raucous voting party as an enactment of democracy, bringing together a variety of residents in a rural community to make decisions for the common good.

• In this crowded composition, Bingham suggests the inclusiveness of a democracy with representatives of every age and social stratum—except, of course, African Americans, who would not enjoy the right to vote until after the Civil War, and women, whose right to participate would not be recognized for another seventy years.

• The painting reveals other irregularities in the electoral system that would not be tolerated today.

• Because there was no system of voter registration, the man in red at the top of the courthouse steps swears on the Bible that he hasn’t already cast a vote.

• Because there was no secret (or even paper) ballot, a voter calls out his choice to the election clerks behind the judge, who openly record it in a ledger.

• Because there were no restrictions on electioneering, the well dressed gentleman behind the voter—evidently one of the candidates—is free to hand his card to citizens just before they cast their vote.

• Yet none of this appears to dull the spirit of the voting process.

• The lack of a single dramatic focus in The County Election is an expression of the democratic ideal:

All men appear as equals, with no one vote worth more than another

• Several members of the electorate engage in serious discussion, perhaps debating the candidates’ qualifications.

• Another group clusters around a newspaper, a potent tool of democracy

• Nevertheless, Bingham seems to question the integrity of an election conducted so casually.

• In the left foreground, a portly man already sprawled in his chair accepts more hard cider from an African American precinct worker, presumably in exchange for a vote.

• This is the only African American who is in the picture and he is not able to vote. Slavery was still in effect in Missouri.

• Behind him, a well-to-do gentleman literally drags a slumping body to the polls as he casts a meaningful glance toward the candidate in blue.

• A figure beside the courthouse steps (directly below the man giving an oath) tosses a coin, as though the winner of this contest might as well be determined by luck (or money) as by an orderly election;

• In the foreground, the actions of two boys, absorbed in a childhood pastime, mumble-the-peg in which a knife thrown into the ground determines the winner, suggest that the political process is little more than a game of chance.

• More ominously, a tattered figure in the front right corner hangs his bandaged head, perhaps to imply that for all the apparent good will of the crowd, violence lies just beneath the surface.

• Besides commenting on American electioneering in general, The County Election records a particular political event.

• As many of Bingham’s contemporaries would have known, the painting depicts Election Day 1850 in Saline County, Missouri, when the artist himself was running for a place in the State Legislature.

• Bingham lost that election to E. D. Sappington, whom he represents as the unprincipled candidate in the shiny top hat.

• Sappington, with his workers, did try to buy votes with liquor, and because he was related to the judge and one of the clerks, the election’s outcome naturally aroused suspicion.

• Bingham did not contest the results, but The County Election makes an obvious indictment of his political opponent.

• The artist himself makes an appearance in the picture as the figure in the stovepipe hat seated on the courthouse steps, attended by a friendly dog and two men in white hats who pause to look over his shoulder.

• Bingham’s quiet concentration sets him apart from the crowd, and we can only wonder whether he is keeping track of the votes in order to tally them for himself, or sketching the unruly practices of a young democracy.

• Other works by

George Caleb Bingham

Family on the Frontier

John Quincy Adams

Thomas Withers Nelson

The Homestead Act of 1862

160 acres to anyone 21 years or older.

Must live on the land and show evidence of making improvements.

Only 40% made it.

Essay Question 1

• Describe all the different shapes of hats in this painting.

• What do the hats suggest about the occupations of these individuals?

Essay Question 2

• What message does Bingham give in this crowded scene about the election process in American democracy?

Essay Question 3• Compare this election scene with a

contemporary American voting scene.

• look closely at this painting and notice the many different things people are

doing.• Find the CONNECTIONS with then and

now. Identify similarities and differences.