GEORGE CALEB BINGHAM 1811-1879
Portrait of James Harrison Cravens, 1842
Oil on canvas, oval, 27 x 22" (68.58 x 55.88 cm.)
Unsigned
Museum purchase, 966-0-126

Lour quite justified admiration for George Caleb Bingham's paintings of Missouri River flatboatmen and frontier political events-images which create much of our mythic vision of the American West-we forget that his portraits are more numerous by far and provided the greater part of his livelihood. Born in Virginia, Bingham emigrated with his family to Missouri in 1819, where by the age of twenty-one he had become an itinerant Portrait painter along the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, ultimately settling in St. Louis. He studied briefly in Philadelphia and visited Baltimore and possibly New York, where his first boatmen picture was exhibited in 1838. Upon returning to Missouri he continued to paint portraits, but in 1840 sent a landscape, two versions of a literary subject, and three figure pieces to the annual exhibition at the National Academy of Design. It was also in 1840 that Bingham gave a political speech and painted a banner supporting William Henry Harrison, the presidential candidate of the Whig Party, of which Bingham was an ardent member. As much a politician as a painter, after Harrison's victory Bingham moved to Washington, D.C. in 1840, where he hoped to establish a wider reputation by painting the notables of the new Whig administration. It was there, in August 1842, that Bingham painted James Harrison Cravens (1801-1876). Like Bingham, a native of Virginia and a Whig, Cravens had moved to Indiana, where he served in the state House of Representatives from 1831 to 1832 and the state Senate in 1839, before being elected to the Twenty-seventh Congress in 1841. Cravens was elected again to the Indiana House in 1856, and served during the Civil War as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Indiana Volunteer Infantry.
Simple in structure, the Cravens portrait is one of Bingham's best from his Washington years. It is crisply drawn and firmly modeled. Although Bingham did not leave out the scar on Cravens's left cheek, detail is, in general, less insistent than before his Washington years. Bingham has softened the contrast between highlights and shadows, contours are no longer hard and glaring. The successful suggestion of the satin coat lapel is an uncommon accomplishment.
Bingham returned to Missouri from Washington in late 1844 to paint portraits of prominent politicians, and himself became a member of the Missouri Legislature and later State Treasurer and Adjutant General. In 1845 he sent to the American Art-Union Fur Traders Descending the Missouri (1845, The Metropolitan Museum of Art), and during the following years he produced the genre pictures which have established his enduring reputation.

WILLIAM S. TALBOT