George Caleb Bingham: Witness to History

George Caleb Bingham was born in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley on March 20, 1811 near Weyers Cave in Augusta County, a scant thirty-five years after the birth of the country. It was a time of self-consciousness. On a public level, Americans were acutely aware that the new nation would reflect their experiment in democracy in the eyes of the world. On a private level, honor was not simply a word; but a state of being.  The year 1811 was a time when the words of the country’s founding documents – the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights – were still fresh. As members of the republic, people conceived of themselves as independent, virtuous, equal citizens working for the common good.  Young George absorbed the thoughts and feelings that pervaded the spirit of the times. 

In the United States of 1811, art was not pervasive. In most of America, art was nowhere to be seen. With principles of equality still foremost in American minds, decorating a home with fine art could be conceived as undemocratic. Protestant principles ruled out religious art.  There were no art supply stores, no art galleries, and only one museum, the Peale Museum in Philadelphia, where works of art hung among specimens of natural history. In Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, 300 miles from the Philadelphia, a young boy with innate artistic talent could not absorb art, he could express it in his own way. 

Early Years[1]

George Caleb Bingham was named after his paternal grandfather, George Washington Bingham, who was born in Virginia about 1750, and so around 16 when the Revolutionary War began.  Was George Washington his given name, or did he embrace the name of America’s hero?  After the Revolutionary War, G. W. Bingham moved from New England to Virginia. He became a Methodist minister and owned a tobacco and wheat plantation 18 miles west of Charlottesville. His namesake grandson remembered him as “a tall and white-headed gentleman, overflowing with the milk of human kindness,” who “was exceedingly kind and indulgent” to his numerous slaves, “never using the lash or allowing it to be used upon his place.’[2] 

George Washington Bingham and his wife, Louisa Vest, named a son Henry Vest Bingham. Henry grew to be “a fine specimen of vigorous manhood,” standing six feet tall and weighing nearly 180 lbs. During a drought in 1808, Henry transported the wheat crop west to a spot near Weyer’s Cave where the south branch of the Shenandoah River flowed strong.  A grist mill there, as well as saw mills were owned by Matthias Amend. Amend had moved to Virginia from Pennsylvania with his only child, a daughter, after his wife and  died.  Matthias had been “child of poverty…favored with none of the advantages of education” who wanted more for his daughter. Throughout her childhood, he had sent her to a nearby town for the best available education. Every Saturday after she returned home from a week of instruction, she taught her father. One can only imagine the strength of the bond between them. While Henry Bingham waited for the wheat to be ground, he spent time with the millwright’s daughter, Maria Christina. Henry Bingham fell in love with this educated woman. They married 8 September 1808.[3] 

In an unpublished memoir, George Caleb Bingham wrote, “As my mother, Mary, was the only treasure which my Grandfather Amend valued, in giving her away, he also surrendered to my father his entire earthly possessions.”  Matthias asked “only that he should have a home with his daughter during the period of his natural life.” When their first child was born 19 November 1809, Henry and Mary named him Matthias Amend Bingham. George Caleb was born a year and a half later, then Elizabeth Juliann in 1812, Isaac Newton in 1814, Henry Vest, Jr. in 1817, and Frances Louisa in 1818.  Their circumstances were comfortable.  George Caleb Bingham’s 1853 painting, Landscape with Water Wheel and Boy (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) http://www.mfa.org/collections/object/landscape-with-waterwheel-and-boy-fishing-34104 may be based upon a mental image from his childhood in Virginia. Despite managing the mills and a 1,000 acre farm, Henry had time to sit with his second son to teach the boy to draw on a slate.  George showed an innate, irrepressible talent that traveled from the slate to the walls of the farm’s outbuildings.

The family’s situation changed when a friend of the family died.  Henry had co-signed a note for the friend and was left with full responsibility for its payment.  In 1818, to fulfill the obligation, Henry sold the property his father-in-law had given him.  He rode off to explore the allegedly fertile lands of Missouri Territory.  The following year he moved his family, his father-in-law, his wife, and their children, to Franklin, Missouri, at the western border of the American frontier.[4]

Henry opened an inn on the square of the riverfront town.  He bought a tobacco farm twenty miles upriver at Arrow Rock. With William T. Lamme, the region’s most prosperous trader, he opened a tobacco factory. He also served as a justice of the peace and a judge of the county court.  But on the day after Christmas 1823, at the age of 38, Henry Vest Bingham died.  Once again, he was deeply in debt.[5]

In her four years in Missouri, Mary Bingham had lost not only her husband, but her father, Matthias, who drowned in the Missouri River in 1822, and two daughters, Frances died in  March 1820 at the age of two, and Elizabeth, 9, in March 1821.  In the winter of 1823 she was a 36-year-old widow with four sons, Matthias, 14, George, 12, Isaac, 9, and Henry, Jr., 6, and a daughter, Amanda, 3.  To support herself and her five children, Mary opened a girls’ school, arguably, the first female academy west of the Mississippi. She may have had some finanacial help from members of her husband’s family who had moved to Saline County: Henry’s youngest brother John (1794 – 1838) and their cousin Wyatt (1793-1850), who had married Henry’s youngest sister, Rebecca (1793-after 1850).  Some say Henry’s Masonic brothers may have paid off the mortgage on the tobacco farm in Arrow Rock, where the family moved from Franklin. [6]    

Despite their fluctuating economic position, the Bingham children came from Virginia’s planter class. The children were well-educated and well-mannered. This demeanor, more than their financial situation, enabled them to be at ease in the highest echelons of society, as their later lives proved.  The first test was George Caleb Bingham’s apprenticeship as a cabinet maker in 1827.  He was 16.

Apprentice

In 1827, the American republic grappled quietly with changes brought by a revolution born alongside the American Revolution. Less visible yet more powerful, the Industrial Revolution grew relentlessly, imperceptibly cracking the country’s social and political foundations. In the period historians named the Era of Good Feelings, the effects were only beginning to be seen.

Little did George Caleb Bingham know as he began his apprenticeship that in the not-too-distant future, furniture factories would replace cabinet makers. At the time, cabinetmaking was a good option for a person with an artistic bent to earn a living, especially on the frontier. By 1827, an aspiring artist in New York City could learn the principles of drawing at the recently formed National Academy of Design. In New York and Philadelphia, established artists taught students individually. In these centers of commerce an artist could earn a living. But not in Missouri. [1] 

Bingham is reputed to have studied under two cabinetmakers who also worked as Methodist preachers: Jesse Green of Arrow Rock and Justinian Williams of Columbia.  Green left Missouri in 1830 to be a missionary to the Shawnee in Indian Territory across Missouri’s western border. Williams, a biblical scholar, poured still more biblical knowledge into this grandson of a Methodist minister. In his free time, Bingham’s demeanor, education and quick wit allowed him entry into the highest social classes.  Chief among his friends was James Sidney Rollins, a law student and scion of the Columbia’s wealthiest citizen. Others included medical student Oscar Fitzland Potter who would later serve as the artist’s model for several paintings, and John Woods Harris, a young merchant and a cousin of Rollins.