In Missouri

It was all very confusing to middle-aged Missourians. For years they had been taught that the local artist of whom their fathers had been so proud was an artless fellow who did not know how to draw. Yet in Manhattan last week the Museum of Modern Art was proud to give a great retrospective show to the work of George Caleb Bingham (1811-79). Critics fell over themselves with such phrases as "a modern Delacroix," "last of the Renaissance tradition," "rival of David and Ingres." Only cautious bang-haired Royal Cortissoz sounded a note of doubt in the general acclaim for George Caleb Bingham: "There is no distinction of style about his work. He was a mildly competent, mildly interesting practitioner, whose local legend may well be revived as a matter of pious courtesy."

Mildly competent his work may be, but the elaborate canvases of George Caleb Bingham described early life on the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers far more ably and colorfully than the much-touted Currier & Ives lithographs. Bingham was one of the few painters in the world who was a practicing politician all his life, and he remains today one of the few Missouri artists ever to gain national fame.

Born in Virginia, George Caleb Bingham moved with his family to Howard County in 1819. Left fatherless at the age of twelve he worked as an apprentice cabinet maker and cigar roller, turned to painting as a profession when he met an Eastern artist named Chester Harding who had gone out to the frontier to paint the portrait of the aging Daniel Boone. A severe attack of measles left Bingham as bald as an egg at the age of 19. For the rest of his life he wore a succession of handsomely curled wigs. Quick success in painting portraits of his frontier neighbors enabled him to travel. To study painting he went to St. Louis, Philadelphia, Washington, eventually Duesseldorf, but he never lost touch with Missouri, never wearied of wading into her political struggles. He was elected to the State Legislature in 1848, became a captain in the U. S. Volunteer Reserves in 1861, was State Treasurer in 1862, was defeated for Congress in 1866. In 1874 he was president of the Kansas City Board of Police Commissioners and the next year Adjutant-General of Missouri. He was also married three times.

All this time he continued to turn out a great quantity of Missouri portraits, and a lengthy series of paintings of river boatmen, fishermen, frontier riflemen, fur traders, election day crowds, etc., etc. They were so highly admired by his contemporaries that many of them were engraved and published as prints by the famed Paris house of Goupil et Cie. Goupil et Cie were working on a lithograph of Bingham's most important canvas, The Verdict of the People, during the Siege of Paris in 1871 when a Prussian shell wrecked the entire establishment. The original painting and one of tire two known proofs of that lithograph were both in the Modern Museum's show last week. Skillfully composed, The Verdict of the People showed a great beaver-hatted crowd round the courthouse steps of a little Missouri town, cheering election returns read by a linen-jacketed judge.

More crudely painted, yet more important historically was George Caleb Bingham's Martial Law (Order No. 11). The original remained in Columbia, Mo. last week, was represented at the Modern Museum only by a hand-colored engraving.

In 1863 when Artist Bingham was State Treasurer of Missouri, the Union Troops on the border were commanded by Brigadier-General Thomas Ewing, lawyer and abolitionist from Ohio. To clear the Kansas-Missouri border of armed gangs that infested the territory, General Ewing issued Order No. 11, declaring martial law and decreeing the complete evacuation within 15 days of the population of the border counties. All the hardships that follow any mass emigration ensued. Many of the ousted settlers were friends of Artist Bingham who swore to make General Ewing "forever infamous."

He did not forget. Shortly after the Civil War he painted a highly melodramatic canvas of the evacuation of a Missouri farmhouse: the ruthless soldiers, the fainting mother, the weeping daughters, the stalwart father. When in 1879 Thomas Ewing ran for Governor of Ohio, George Caleb Bingham sent Martial Law junketing from town to town in that State on the crest of a flood of anti-Ewing pamphlets. General Ewing was defeated.

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