Bingham’s genre paintings were neglected by the community of art critics until an exhibit of the Museum of Modern Art (New York) in 1935. His talent lay in his keen interest in the lives of his fellow citizens, which complimented his political activities. A leading citizen in Missouri during the Civil War and the Reconstruction, Bingham’s life spanned the period of expansion following the Louisiana Purchase of 1803.
His own family had come to the Missouri wilderness from Virginia in the first flood tide of immigration to the West. He was a sharp and painstaking observer, not unlike Mark Twain, his contemporary. Bingham’s his paintings of the Mississippi in its most colorful phases have a striking simplicity. In his canvases, we have the honest but remarkable records of the artist’s own day, a magnificent chapter in the saga of the American West.
