Fur Traders Descending the Missouri One of Bingham's most famous paintings, this work is owned by the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Painted around 1845 in the style called
luminism by some historians of American art, it was originally entitled,
French Trader, Half-breed Son. The
American Art Union thought the title potentially controversial and renamed it when it was first exhibited. It reflected the reality of fur trappers and traders frequently marrying
Native American women in their territories; in Canada the ethnic
Métis people have been recognized by the government as a distinct group with status similar to First Nations. The painting is haunting for its evocation of an era in American history—note, in particular, the French-Canadian tuque, or cap, worn by the older man. A black fox (an animal of spiritual significance to Native Americans, whose fur was the most valuable of those traded at the time) is seated at the end of the boat and secured by a chain.
The Election Series Bingham's
Election Series comprises three paintings:
The County Election,
Stump Speaking, and
The Verdict of the People. Bingham intended for the Election Series to reach a national audience rather than Missourians alone. To spread his idea of free people and free institutions, Bingham exhibited his paintings in Washington and urged the Library Committee of Congress to purchase them so American leaders could view them. When the Library Committee of Congress decided to not purchase his trio, he lent the paintings to the Mercantile Library Association in St. Louis.
The County Election depicts a variety of people from several different social classes, such as young boys playing a game, two men talking about the election happening around them, and a mass of men walking up the stairs to vote. A banner shows the words, "The Will of the People[,] The Supreme Law", a credo that had great meaning for Bingham. He believed that people had a right to share their ideas; he also believed that he lost his seat in legislature in 1846 due to the improper following of the people's will. In his first painting of
The County Election, Bingham showed two men flipping a coin beneath a judge. The two people represent
ex-governor Marmaduke's bet that he had placed on the election of Bingham versus his opponent, Erasmus Sappington (allegedly the man in the tall hat soliciting votes is Erasmus Sappington). Bingham also purposefully kept the scene outside to represent universal suffrage, one of his beliefs. The openness of the setting shows that politics should happen in the open rather than behind the curtains of the government. The idea of universal suffrage agrees with Bingham's ideas of the will of the people: every white man should have the right to vote because the will of the people should be the supreme law. The reference to Marmaduke in
The County Election was only relative to Missouri, so in order to generalize the message of the painting to the nation, Bingham removed the two men tossing a coin in the print version. Within Bingham's painting
Stump Speaking, he creates a scene that has both a national message and a local message; some of the people portrayed in the paintings resemble local Missouri politicians. Behind the speaker sits a man resembling Bingham's self-portrait taking notes about the speech, waiting for his turn to speak. The "Stump Speaker" resembled Sappington, who was Bingham's opponent in his previous elections,
The Verdict of the People The last painting of Bingham's Election Series,
The Verdict of the People, tells the end of the story represented in the series. Within this painting, Bingham hid several political motives and ideas similar to the rest of the Election Series. Completed in 1854, the work covered issues of slavery, temperance, and a representative government, subjects that had gone from a local to a national level. During the early 1850s, the temperance movement grew and more states were abolishing alcohol. A book by Herman Humphrey, titled
Parallel between Intemperance and Slavery, associated the cause of anti-slavery to that of temperance. Bingham showed his view on intemperance and slavery by painting a banner that said, "Freedom for Virtue[,] Restriction for Vice." The banner referred to temperance by saying that the vice and alcohol would need to be restricted for the people to be free. The banner then references Bingham's ideas of slavery by using the connection of the temperance movement and the anti-slavery movement to show that Bingham thought negatively about slavery and shared that view with intemperance.
Charles Chilton,
Samuel Chilton,
Thomas B. Hudson,
Missouri Steamboat Capt. Joseph Kinney and
Martha Lykins, a previously unidentified woman who has now been recognized as Bingham's third wife, painted years before their marriage. ==Gallery==