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Dimensions: measurements 29 by 36 in. alternate measurements (73.7 by 91.4 cm)
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Provenance: The American Art-Union, 1845 (acquired from the artist)
James Thompson, New York, 1845 (prize from the above)
Private Collection, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Craig Libhart, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1974
Vose Galleries, Boston, Massachusetts, 1976
Acquired from the above, 1976
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Exhibited: New York, The American Art-Union, 1845, no. 102
St. Louis, Missouri, St. Louis Art Museum; Washington, D.C., The National Gallery of Art, George Caleb Bingham, February-September 1990, pp. 97, 99, 100, 146, illustrated in color p. 99, pl. 22
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Literature: Fern Helen Rusk, George Caleb Bingham: Missouri Artist, Columbia, Missouri, 1917, pp. 23, 125
John Francis McDermott, George Caleb Bingham: River Portraitist, Norman, Oklahoma, 1959, p. 413, no. 27
E. Maurice Bloch, George Caleb Bingham: A Catalogue Raisonné, Berkeley, California, 1967, pp. 48, 234
E. Maurice Bloch, The Paintings of George Caleb Bingham: A Catalogue Raisonné, Columbia, Missouri, 1986, no. 163, p. 173, illustrated p. 65
Michael Edward Shapiro, George Caleb Bingham, New York, 1993, pp. 42, 45, 51, illustrated in color p. 42
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Notes: Painted in 1845.
PROPERTY FROM THE ESTATE OF BARBARA BINGHAM MOORE
In 1845, following a trip east to establish his reputation as an artist, George Caleb Bingham submitted two landscapes and two genre subjects to the American Art-Union. An increasingly popular institution, the American Art-Union drew large crowds to its exhibitions and awarded works from the exhibitions to members of the union by way of lottery. Inclusion in an Art-Union exhibition was an easy way to catch the eye of discerning taste makers and Bingham, after increasing notoriety in Missouri, sought to earn recognition in the bigger metropolis of New York. Bingham exhibited Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, The Concealed Enemy, Cottage Scenery and the present work, Landscape: Rural Scenery. Elizabeth Johns suggests that with his selection of two landscapes, "Bingham makes a claim for his skills in the higher arena of landscape ...The landscapes ... embodied Bingham's ambitions to exalt the view above the everyday into the dignified realm of the aesthetic" (George Caleb Bingham, 1990, p. 97). Bingham, like many American landscape artists, shaped his technique based on the principles of the English landscape school, and most notably the work of Claude Lorrain, whose examples Bingham would have seen through engravings. Of the two landscapes Bingham submitted to the American Art-Union, the present work and Cottage Scenery, the latter is more British in its interpretation of the landscape. Elizabeth Johns continues, "The other painting, Landscape: Rural Scenery is a pendant [to Cottage Scenery]. The flora may be American or English--willows and oaks are found in abundance along rivers in both settings. But the young woman washing her clothes at the riverbank, with the humble accessories of the handmade bench and buckets, suggests beginnings, perhaps the beginnings of a settlement in Missouri. And while a Morland scene was clearly Bingham's teacher in Cottage Scenery, a painting by the American landscapist Durand was his guide for the second work. The magnificent oak tree that dominates the center of Bingham's image echoes the central motif in Durand's The Solitary Oak, one of the most popular landscapes at the National Academy exhibition the previous year when Bingham was in New York himself. The delicately narrative aspect of Bingham's two landscapes, and their sources, provide two nuances of meaning: Cottage Scenery conveys the English antecedents of the Missouri settler, and Landscape: Rural Scenery shows the settler in the vast American countryside. The first painting points to pictorial sources, while the second honors the achievements of the new school of American landscapists" (George Caleb Bingham, 1990, p. 100).
