Stop and Look: The Jolly Flat-boatmen by George Caleb Bingham

George Caleb Bingham isn’t a name to conjure with in Britain, but this picture of his is a national icon in the United States. And that is just what Bingham himself intended. Born in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, he spent much of his career in the state of Missouri, with its two great rivers, the Missouri and the Mississippi, shaping the lives of many of its population. In several pictures he presents life in the American Mid-West before the coming of steam in the 1840s. Here he creates a self-consciously composed tableau populated by the hardy teams of men who worked the ‘flat-boats’ with their shallow draught and long poles, and miscellaneous cargoes on the placid inland waterways. These were craft that had long become obsolete when Bingham celebrated them. 

In spite of the informality of the scene, this picture can be analysed as an almost academic demonstration of human types, arranged in a noticeably symmetrical grouping and embodied in carefully differentiated poses: the central dancing figure is surrounded by seated men seen from different angles, one playing a fiddle, another tapping a gong, a third lying back to watch (in steep foreshortening, a striking feat of draughtsmanship). A later version of the subject, dating from 1857 includes two black men and two children, a boy and a girl, though there are no women in either work. This is a man’s world, driven by masculine vitality. Several other canvases contribute to a group of river scenes that make up an account of early life in central America that is both journalistic in its clarity and poetic in the subtlety of its visual language. 

This is a primitive America, dominated by the exigencies of a strenuous life in the vast landscape, led in the bleached light of long hot days. Bingham painted scenes of social and political life – phases of an election reminiscent of Hogarth’s Election series; carousals in taverns like the Scot David Wilkie’s – but Bingham has a voice of his own. His paint is crisp yet soft, with a Vermeer-like finality, so that even his more complex subjects possess a jewel-like stillness, his busiest scenes calm, balanced and permanent. 

He was ambitious, as the theme of this picture suggests, and took advantage of the institutions of the East Coast, especially in New York City, and of reproductive prints to enhance his fame and reputation. He even spent some time in Düsseldorf, then the European Mecca for American painters (London was past, Paris in the future). But he never lost the fresh, half-naïve touch, and the eye for telling detail, including lively facial expressions, that convey so well his sense of the burgeoning potential of what was then the Far Western borderland of America. It’s this that makes him a vivid illustrator of the pioneering spirit of that time and earns him his place as one of the painters who defined the emerging United States. 

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