George Caleb Bingham was an artist and a man of uncompromising principles. George Caleb Bingham depicted the people and the world around him with unparalleled honesty. His sincerity imbued his paintings with timeless authenticity expressed with increasing technical skill and colors uniquely his own. He helped shape a nation’s vision of itself. More than 200 years after his birth, art reviewers throughout America describe Bingham as one of the country’s best artists. His reputation surpasses the most prestigious painters of his day. His paintings hang in museums across the nation. Public institutions select his work to represent American art throughout the world.

Bingham was born March 20, 1811, when the country was still young. Words of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights were fresh. Even when the world changed around him, he lived by the principles of the country’s founding documents and had no patience with those who did not. Throughout his life, he worked for a national system that included a limitation of slavery and a union of states. He was committed to civil liberties and education. He held office as a state legislator, state treasurer, school board member, police commissioner, and Adjutant General. In those roles, he advocated reason, not partisanship. He preserved state funds, exposed corruption, stopped vigilantism, and sought fair compensation for injustice.

During his lifetime, George Caleb Bingham painted over 300 portraits, nearly 60 genre paintings, (painting of everyday life), and more than 30 landscapes. After his death, memory of him faded. Art historian Fern Helen Rusk tenaciously preserved his artistic legacy in a small volume published in 1914, George Caleb Bingham: The Missouri Artist. Twenty years later, in the midst of the Great Depression when Populism and Regional Art were at their peaks, Bingham’s realism and his representations of the common man found resonance. At the City Art Museum of St. Louis in 1934, Meyric R. Rogers exhibited the work of George Caleb Bingham. Early the following year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York re-introduced him to a national audience. Albert Christ-Janer studied Bingham in the 1940s while most of the art history texts of the decade overlooked him.

In the mid-1950s, art historian Edgar P. Richardson wrote:

Bingham saw the grand meaning of the commonplace. What is more extraordinary, he was able to create…a style of great visual poetry – a large and almost archaic severity of drawing, brilliantly luminous, yet smoky in color and extremely subtle in its gradations of light and air. And over all there is a mood of grandeur and solemnity in his work, as if he would say to his fellows: This is a heroic age…

His best works were done in a period extending not much over ten years. In 1856 he went abroad to study at Düsseldorf, the seat of a German school of literary-sentimental narrative painting which had begun to have a great reputation in America in the fifties… His work was there infected to some extent with sentimentality and overemphasis; at least, it did not gain. When he returned in 1859, the Civil War was about to burst upon us. Bingham was a man of strong Union convictions. He threw himself into the political struggle in his native state.^[1]

Countless iterations of that latter assessment followed, often reduced to one sentence, such as: “Unfortunately, on returning home, his style deteriorated due to an adoption of a dry academic technique,” or phrased as "Bingham created his best work in the 1840s." Omitted is the significant fact of the turmoil of the 1860s.^[2]