George Caleb Bingham’s Serene Images of Rivers and Frontier Life

Raftsmen Playing Cards (1847), part of "Navigating the West: George Caleb Bingham and the River" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Credit Saint Louis Art Museum

Starting around 1845, Bingham (1811-1879) depicted the hardscrabble life along the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers the regions main arteries as spacious idylls of serenity and sometimes joy. More artifice than reality, these paintings are carefully examined in Navigating the West: George Caleb Bingham and the River, a riveting exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art organized by the St. Louis Art Museum and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth. The Mets presentation has been overseen by Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, curator of American paintings and sculpture, assisted by Stephanie L. Herdrich, an assistant research curator.

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The first museum show devoted to Binghams river paintings, it contains 16 of the 17 that still exist. (Missing is one in the collection of the White House, which does not lend, though a reproduction of the painting, Lighter Relieving a Steamship Aground, is included here.) They are complemented by nearly 50 of Binghams exacting figure studies in brush, black ink and wash over pencil. almost the total he made for the river paintings. They are often as engaging: Their sensitive play of light and shadow across rugged faces and different textures of worn, rumpled clothing gives the men a very real physical weight and often a substantial psychic presence as well.

Part of the timeless quality of Binghams art stems from the slow, patient way he drew his figures, which were often translated directly into his paintings, and sometimes used in more than one. It makes sense that he did not sketch actual boatmen but relied instead on a small group of acquaintances he posed and often dressed. One can imagine that real life moved too fast.

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All but two of the drawings are accompanied by possibly the most moving credit line ever: Lent by the People of Missouri. The explanation for it a semi-cliffhanger involving a statewide campaign in the late 1970s is in the shows first text panel.

Made mostly between 1845 and 1857, Binghams river paintings were greatly outnumbered by his many commissioned portraits, combined with some relatively landlocked landscapes and genre scenes. But the river images show him at his best and most original, and rank among the treasures of 19th-century American painting.

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They were made by a largely self-taught artist who began as an itinerant portrait painter, learning from drawing manuals and engravings of paintings. There are three early portraits here, including one of a well-off woman and her young son, from 1837, that has a folk-art-like awkwardness, and a powerful self-portrait from 1834-35, that conveys Binghams determination, with a faceted, almost sculptural solidity that hints of early Czanne.

Binghams idealizing tendencies were in some ways cued to his large following in the United States and Europe people who knew his work from the many prints of his paintings (authorized and not), as well as collectors who bought the original canvases. But mainly his idealization reflected an optimistic temperament that seems to have been drawn to the best in people and nature and registered on the aesthetic spectrum between lyrical and neo-Classical.

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He was born in Augusta County, Va., and went West at age 7 or 8, when his family resettled in Franklin, Mo., a thriving frontier town on the banks of the Missouri River ( since washed away by floods ). His father established a successful plantation before he died in 1823; thereafter the familys lifestyle diminished. Bingham did not start traveling East, to see European paintings and to try to drum up business, until 1838, and his river paintings were all but behind him by 1856, when he first went to Europe, spending two months in Paris and about two years in Dsseldorf. He was also a successful politician, serving as Missouris state treasurer during the Civil War, but mainly he was the first important American artist to spend most of his life west of the Mississippi.

Binghams river-centered world has a hypnotic, slow-motion quality. Trappers pause dreamily in their canoes; boatmen play cards, watch the river or rest, sometimes looking toward us with knowing directness. Except for an occasional grounded steamboat or a snag poking above the glassy planes of water, there is no sense of conflict, danger or disruption. Of course, central to this peacefulness is that Binghams universe is populated almost entirely by men of European extraction.

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An exception to the repose is the dancer in Binghams best-known, most copied work, The Jolly Flatboatmen of 1846, who is captured midjig, but is also the apex of a pyramid of eight figures that would have done Poussin proud. These tableaus can almost feel like paintings within paintings.

The main excitement here, and in other river paintings, is space itself, delineated by the open, symmetrical compositions of water, sky, riverbank and vessel. The boats are centered, slablike forms that loom in the field of vision and then recede quickly toward the horizon. In Flatboatmen, the recession is signaled by the extreme foreshortening of a man seen from behind, on his back, his hands locked behind his head, his body pointing straight into the picture. And nowhere is recession more thrilling than in Raftsmen Playing Cards, where the wood raft, a beautifully textured mouse-gray, juts in from the bottom of the painting, placing us on it.

Bingham is sometimes called a Luminist and sometimes a genre painter. In his river paintings he was both and more. During his lifetime, they were heralded as uplifting representations of frontier life. When Binghams reputation began to revive in the 1930s, he was seen as a forerunner of the American Scene painting of Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry. Acquisitions of his works by the St. Louis Art Museum and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., were reported in local newspapers as was the Mets acquisition in 1934 of his masterpiece, the beatific Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, one of the earliest, emptiest and most serene paintings of the series.

More surprising is the way Binghams golden light and ethereal backgrounds which he brushed in lightly once his more solid, detailed figures and the boats were in place can also evoke an artist like Jean-Antoine Watteau, the 18th-century French Rococo painter of ambiguous commedia dellarte vignettes.

The exhibition ends with something completely different: a DVD projection of all 25 scenes from a 348-foot-long painted panorama about life along the Mississippi, made around 1850 and now in the St. Louis Art Museum. Evidence of the antebellum fascination with the Mississippi, it is a colorful cavalcade of wonderfully crude, upward-tilting landscapes and momentous events: a tornado, a man being chased by wolves, an Indian mound being excavated and the burial of the explorer Hernando de Soto, who died on the rivers banks.

It is a wonderful thing, but the sight of it makes all the more amazing the spell-like stillness of Binghams paintings the carefully clustered men doing next to nothing, on floating stages set in expansive volumes of space as in amber, on an eternal July afternoon.