His pictures are very cheerful and funny: Who is George Caleb Bingham?

(1811-1879) American painter. He was born on March 21, 1811, in Augusta County, Virginia. His family immigrated to Missouri in 1819. Bingham, who lost his father four years later, started life as a furniture apprentice at a young age. He studied law and geology for a short time. He started sign making, then portrait painting. In various periods of his life, he participated in political actions and took positions in the state. Once, in the days following the Civil War, he painted pictures to prevent the election of a general who had forcibly evicted the people from their hometowns as Ohio state president, and he circulated them from town to town, influencing the outcome of the election.

George Caleb Bingham (March 20, 1811 – July 7, 1879) was an American artist, soldier and politician known in his lifetime as "the Missouri Artist".

He studied painting for a while with the painter Chester Harding (1792-1866). He studied painting at the Pennsylvania and Washington Fine Arts Academies between 1838 and 1844. He gained wealth and fame as a result of the reproduction and distribution of his paintings, which were very popular with the public, using the lithography technique. He went to Germany in 1856, and lived and worked in Düsseldorf for three years. In 1877 he was appointed professor of art at the University of Missouri. He died on July 7, 1879, in Kansas City, Missouri.

He gained prominence with his paintings documenting local and contemporary life in and around Bingham, Missouri. In his works, he cheerfully portrays the transportation on the Missouri River, rowers, hunters, and the daily lives of ordinary country folk, with some caricature. In these scenes, which he mostly reflects in an atmosphere of entertainment, he is extraordinarily successful in diversifying the reactions of individuals to events. His original expression, which reached poeticism, lost its freshness after his working period in Germany and left its place to masterful but stereotyped practices.

WORKS (mainly):

• The Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, 1845, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, (“Fur Traders Cross the Missouri River”);
• Shooting for the Beej, 1850, Brooklyn Museum, New York, (“Shooting Contest for Meat”);
• The Trappers' Return, 1851, Detroit Institute of Arts, ("The Return of the Hunters").

George Caleb Bingham: List of works

https://historicmissourians.shsmo.org/george-caleb-bingham