George Caleb Bingham

Perhaps no other genre painter better typifies the idealization of the American frontier than George Caleb Bingham. Growing up in St. Louis, Bingham was almost entirely self-taught, except for a brief time spent as an art student in Philadelphia. Best known for his depictions of frontiersmen and fur traders on the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, Bingham often created scenes that can best be described as those of fraternal communities at the periphery of western civilization.