The Sovereigns

Art, to Missouri Painter George Caleb Bingham, was a personal invention. According to his biographer, John Francis McDermott of Washington University in St. Louis, Bingham never had a drawing lesson in his life, never even saw a professional portrait being painted before he began turning out his own. The "first master developed beyond the Alleghenies" was an original indebted to no other artist dead or alive. Summing up his "ideal of art" in a lecture at the University of Missouri before his death in 1879, Bingham simply said that there was no greater teacher than nature, and no higher authority to follow than one's own eye. "Artists permit themselves to be absorbed only by what they love," he believed.

What Bingham himself loved was the bustle of an ordinary day in an ordinary Missouri town. His great paintings, as Missourians rediscovered in the '30s when they compared them with the rash of mediocre WPA genre paintings, were of river boatmen, hunters and farmers, politicians and voters--the thousands of Citizen Xs whom Bingham liked to call "the sovereigns." Drunk or sober, rich or in rags, they found their way into his sketchbooks, and these drawings are among the most appealing documents left behind by any American artist. Last week a selection of them was on display at Manhattan's M. Knoedler & Co., making the sedate halls of that venerable gallery echo with the hubbub of the young Missouri.

Bingham did not lampoon his sovereigns, but he did not sentimentalize them either. He recorded them as they were in all their combined commonness and individuality. Each remains a distinct personality, caught in some attitude that only personality could make. His political drawings and paintings are among his best--a consequence of his running twice for the Missouri legislature. After losing out in 1846, he charged fraud and swore that he would decontaminate himself by stripping off his clothes, scouring himself with sand and water, and staying "out of politics forever." But however Bingham the man felt, Bingham the artist found politics irresistible. He loved to portray oily candidates, drunks being carried to the polls lest their vote be lost, voters emerging from a bar having been beaten up by party toughs. Yet the rowdyism is all so aboveboard that the viewer has no doubt that the sovereigns will do right.

As the St. Louis Weekly Reveille noted when one of Bingham's political paintings was first shown, the work rings with authenticity. Here, trumpeted the Reveille, is "the manly, open and fearless cast of countenance peculiar to western men, delineated as no painter could sketch them, except he both possessed genius and had mingled among such scenes."

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