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Great Plains Quarterly Great Plains Studies, Center for

Winter 1985

Originality And Influence In 's Art

Stephen C. Behrendt University of Nebraska-Lincoln, [email protected]

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Behrendt, Stephen C., "Originality And Influence In George Caleb Bingham's Art" (1985). Great Plains Quarterly. 1819. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/1819

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Great Plains Studies, Center for at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Great Plains Quarterly by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. ORIGINALITY AND INFLUENCE IN GEORGE CALEB BINGHAM'S ART

STEPHEN C. BEHRENDT

Perception is an act of modification Often condescendingly labeled "regional" of anticipation. art because of its frequently eclectic emphasis -E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion upon the local and the "folksy," this sort of is in fact directly related to the Romantic picturesque, as defined not only by The work of "the artist," George eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art and Caleb Bingham (1811-79), offers us a good literary critics and practitioners but also by opportunity for considering the broad subject aestheticians from Edmund Burke and William of originality and influence in the arts. The Gilpin to Goethe and Ruskin. It follows from combination of originality and convention in the new emphasis upon the real and the particu­ paintings such as Fur Traders Descending the lar that may be traced in the poetry of Words­ Missouri, The Jolly Flatboatmen, and The worth and Freneau and the paintings of Con­ County Election can tell us much about the stable and Church.1 dynamics of that branch of American art which On the other hand, the position of the sought to reconcile the inherited traditions of neoclassical advocates of the general and the formal, academic European art with the often consensus who united behind Sir Joshua strikingly unconventional reality of a New Reynolds is anticipated by Dr. ] ohnson's Imlac, World. who declares that the poet must concern himself not with the individual but with the species ("he does not number the streaks of the tulip,,).2 Artists like Bingham, however, Stephen C. Behrendt has published several were endeavoring to paint not just streaked works on literature, art, and artistic influence; tulips but a whole garden of flowers entirely the most recent is The Moment of Explosion: unknown in Europe. Furthermore, that ele­ Blake and the Illustration of Milton (1983). ment of the unfamiliar, the different, fre­ He is associate professor of English at the Uni­ quently gains from the emphasis afforded by versity of Nebraska-Lincoln. its juxtaposition with the familiar, the con­ [CPQ 5 (Winter 1985): 24-38.] ventional.

24 ORIGINALITY AND INFLUENCE IN GEORGE CALEB BINGHAM'S ART 25

TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL make statements of his own. His statements, however, do in some cases gain significance In many ways this study addresses the sub­ from the implied act of comparison involved ject of tradition and the individual talent both in any such manipulation of source materials. on the personal level of the particular artist Still, we need to remind ourselves that judg­ and on the broader national level of American ments about "influence" are risky, that visual art as it sought to distinguish itself from the analogies do not in themselves constitute relia­ European tradition that lay behind it. An artist ble indicators of influence, and that even where like Bingham (or like frontier artists such as it can be demonstrated that an artist has appro­ Remington and Russell) faced a dilemma in priated something from a predecessor-whether attempting to portray in formal works of art a concept or a particular detail-we still need scenes, events, and experiences quite unlike to make some tough decisions about the artist's anything familiar to either the producers or the intentions in using that material from his or her consumers of conventional European art. The predecessor.5 We might take up another anal­ "language of art" had not yet developed the ogy and say that studies of "influence" are requisite "vocabulary" for the American ex­ studies in geneology, while studies of "sources" perience, with the result that Bingham and or "artistic borrowing" are largely studies in others were forced both to adopt and to adapt grafting: the former concern the development the inherited vocabulary of the western Euro­ of the body, the latter the history of limb and pean visual tradition for their own purposes. organ transplants.6 The art historian Goran Ironically, this occurred even as in Europe the Hermen~n has remarked that among the princi­ trend in visual and verbal art toward both pal potential values inherent in studies of romanticizing and sensationalizing the Ameri- artistic influence are (1) the possible insights can frontler· was gammg. . momentum. 3 I n any into the nature of the creative process, (2) the event, one discovers in the works of these evidence of how cultural contacts are made and American artists a visual device in many ways new ideas passed from person to person or cul­ analogous to what literary critics call the simile. ture to culture, and (3) the degree to which an That is, an unfamiliar scene is frequently ren­ artist's originality may be indicated both by dered in such a way that its significance is made what he or she employs and by what he or she apparent to the viewer through some degree of does not employ from works or traditions likeness to a picture (or pictures) with which known to that artist,7 All these matters enter the viewer is already familiar. This visual simile into the considerations about Bingham's art functions like its literary relative: not only is that follow here. the similarity revealed, the difference-the uniqueness-is heightened in the process. REAL AND SPECIOUS RELATIONSHIPS Literary critics have made much of the am­ biguity inherent in influence studies.4 I do not A series of pictures will serve to illustrate mean to suggest that Bingham or others like both the possibilities and the pitfalls implicit him set out to repudiate the European tradi­ in any study of artistic influence. First, con­ tion in some sort of artistic patricide. Bingham sider a pair of pictures. One is the version of does not engage in deliberate misinterpretation Bingham's Fur Traders Descending the Missouri of his predecessors as a revision is tic means of that was originally entitled French Trader and freeing himself from any crippling fear of pos­ Half Breed Son when Bingham submitted it to sibly repeating their statements in his own art. the American Art Union in 1845 (fig. 1).8 The Bingham did not need, as Harold Bloom sug­ other is Caspar David Friedrich's Ship on the gests many poets did, to liberate himself from River Elbe in the Early Morning Mist (fig. 2), his predecessors, but rather to employ their exhibited at the Dresden Academy in 1822. works in a variety of ways that enabled him to Each presents a relatively commonplace scene 26 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, WINTER 1985

FIG. 1. George Caleb Bingham, Fur Traders Descending the Missouri. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

that combines the particularizing tendency the unity of the effect and to the illusion of of realism with the generalizing impulse of land­ distance.,,9 This Claudian device is cited by scape and genre art. Each artist suffuses his J. T. Flexner as a "soft mist" that keeps scenes canvas with a misty haze that both conceals intimate even as it dimly hints at what may lie and entices, inviting the viewer to try to pene­ beyond.10 trate the haze in order to discover (or imagine) But can we claim there is a substantive con­ background details that are therefore as much nection between these two works? That is, do the creations (or projections) of the viewer as the works themselves exhibit features that they are the productions of the painter. Indeed, permit us to draw any concrete conclusions Henry Adams has argued that in a painting like about originality and influence in Bingham's Fur Traders Descending the Missouri Bingham painting, completed as it was some twenty­ follows the popular conception of landscape three years after Friedrich's? Or, on the other dating back to Claude Lorrain, in whose land­ hand, are we tempted to impose a relationship scapes the most notable single feature is the on the basis of the shared feature of the misty "golden atmosphere, which often made back­ river setting? Did Bingham know Friedrich's ground objects indistinct, but contributed to picture? There is no evidence to indicate that ORIGINALITY AND INFLUENCE IN GEORGE CALEB BINGHAM'S ART 27

FIG. 2. Caspar David Friedrich, Ship on the River Elbe in the Early Morning Mist. Wollraf­ Richartz-Museum, Cologne. he did. Moreover, even if he had in fact seen Historians of nineteenth-century American Friedrich's painting, would Bingham have fully art have generally been quick to point out the understood its symbolism, a very personal remarkable coincidence of the virtually simul­ symbolic system that becomes fully apparent taneous creation by Bingham and his contem­ only after one studies many of the German porary (1807-68) of artist's works and the cryptic things he wrote thematically and structurally similar pictures: and said about them? That the ship is for Bingham's Fur Traders and Mount's Eel Spear­ Friedrich the ship of life might be intuited; ing at Setauket. Painted, like the Fur Traders, that the river is the river of death (not the river in 1845, Eel Spearing also seems related in form of life that proceeds from the throne of God and structure-if not in circumstance-to John [Rev. 22:1), as one might assume from Christian Singleton Copley's Watson and the Shark iconography) might be less apparent. Still less (1778). Both depict boats propelled slowly would the uninitiated viewer be likely to know over tranquil waters by single oarsmen; both that the prominent bank of vegetation in the include an older figure, a younger figure, and a foreground "is an allusion to the rapid passing small animal; both involve some type of hunt­ of life," or that the mist is Friedrich's recur­ ing as ostensible subject. Is there, then, an in­ rent symbol for time. It has been said that for herent relationship between Bingham's and Friedrich "nothing was ever an object per se, Mount's works as paintings, or are they related it was also a symbol."l1 One would scarcely be simply by a fortuitous accident of coincidence? tempted to venture the same claim for Bingham. Finally, we may observe yet another variety 28 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, WINTER 1985

of apparent influence in the later version of intent upon reproducing the living human Bingham's The Jolly Flatboatmen (fig. 3),12 figure. In a letter to James Sidney Rollins late which appears indebted to a classical sculpture in his life, Bingham still calls such cast sculp­ of a dancing satyr for the figure at the apex of tures "indispensible" as "models for pupils the compositional triangle: the torso and legs in Art.,,15 Beyond this cast sculpture, we may are virtually identical, the arm positions re­ reasonably suspect that Bingham also drew versed but only slightly modified.13 In his upon Gericault's Raft of the Medusa (1819)­ study of Bingham's work, E. Maurice Bloch which he undoubtedly knew at least from an remarks that this particular classical figure engraving-not only for the crowded general "was actually well known in small-scale repro­ compositional triangle but also for the partic­ ductions that must have ornamented many a ular detail of the handkerchief waved by the parlor in Bingham's time.,,14 Bingham himself dancing flatboatman, another instance of appar­ had become convinced early in his three-month ent borrowing that so many critics have noted. stay in in 1838 of the value of So far we have established only that there drawing from figure casts (as opposed to the appear to be both general and specific corres­ inadequate two-dimensional images in engrav­ pondences between Bingham's works and those ings and instruction books) for the painter of his predecessors and contemporaries. But

FIG. 3. George Caleb Bingham, The Jolly Flatboatmen (2). Daniel J. Terra Collection, Terra Museum of American Art, Evanston, Illinois. ORIGINALITY AND INFLUENCE IN GEORGE CALEB BINGHAM'S ART 29 mere analogies do not establish influence, nor three central figures to the lower right corner of do subjective discussions that treat different Raphael's Judgment of Paris. But the concept works in similar but nonetheless metaphorical of a group of clothed men and nude women language. Bingham was not, of course, doing owes something as well to Giorgione's Concert anything unusual when he turned to the work Champetre; Pastorale (ca. 1510). Many artists of others both for inspiration and for technical borrowed from Raphael, of course, including suggestion. Indeed, copying was still routinely Bingham, who seems to have taken the seated accepted well into the nineteenth century as a nude who looks out at us from that same figure means by which a young artist might perfect group in The Judgment of Paris as the basis for his craft, if not necessarily his art. Certainly similarly posed seated figures in Boatmen on such copying of the masters had played a very the Missouri (1846) and The Squatters (1850). large part in the training of artists in the eigh­ When Manet and Bingham borrow from Ra­ teenth century, where imitation was in fact phael's picture, though, do they wish to carry typically accounted a form of interpretation as over their original context along with thebor­ well as of instruction. That visual emulation rowed images? That is, are we intended to and adaptation is apparent, moreover, not just discern in the Luncheon on the Grass some in apprentice works but in mature productions modern version of, or commentary upon, The as well. Among Bingham's immediate predeces­ Judgment of Paris? Do we need the precursor sors and contemporaries in America, for in­ work in order fully to understand the new stance, we discover that Asher B. Durand work, or is that new work self-sufficient, its (1796-1886) was much influenced by Rubens, nature and significance entirely unrelated to Constable, and Claude Lorrain; along with the any aspect of the precursor's content? If it is English painter John Martin, Constable and thus "free-standing," the apparent influence Lorrain also inform the work of Thomas Cole relationship need not trouble us beyond our (1801-48). The genre painter John Quidor routine observation of the visual similarity: (1801-81) drew frequently from Rowlandson what has been borrowed is a matter of surface and the English comic engravers, and Mount more than substance. But most borrowing is turned on more than one occasion to the work not so easily dismissed. of the English painter David Wilkie. Indeed, when an artist is largely self-taught, as Bingham BINGHAM AND NATIONALISM IN ART was, learning one's craft by imitating the mas­ ters (often from poor-quality prints or from The whole broad topic of influence relations engravings, better in quality but technically in the arts is particularly relevant to the case of "translated," in art instruction books) is both an artist like Bingham. As a self-taught western natural and necessary. When the superior artist painter, Bingham was keenly aware that much acquires the language of art in this fashion, he of his reputation-and hence his market-would or she occasionally turns that idiom against depend upon an eastern Establishment. Bing­ itself as a way of distinguishing the new work . ham scholars generally agree that the artist from those that inform it. It is to this same tra­ tailored his genre pictures of river life to what dition of critical imitation that so formidable he felt would prove most successful, which is an artist as Picasso belongs in our own century; to say, most salable. Part of Bingham's achieve­ indeed, Picasso is reputed to have said that "the ment lay in the relative success with which his best criticism of any work of art is another pictures were able to appeal to "both the local work of art." 16 pride of the West and the primitivist nostalgia But when one copies all or part of another of the relatively sophisticated eastern sea­ work, what exactly is it that is copied? For board.,,17 As Bloch and others have explained, example, Manet's Luncheon on the Grass (Le by the mid-1840s there was already a good Dejeuner sur l'herbe; 1863) is indebted for its deal of literature about the West in circulation 30 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, WINTER 1985 in the East, and that material could not but and once he had been dubbed "The Missouri pique the interest of a buying public in paint­ Artist," as he had by 1850-then Bingham was ings that would give some sense of what actual­ able to turn away from his early staple, portrait ly existed "out there" on the frontier. So in painting, and concentrate on more of his west­ exhibiting and popularizing his "Western" genre ern subjects.20 paintings, Bingham came to be regarded both in his own time and by many subsequent students BINGHAM'S ART AND THE of his art as something of a documentary real­ ACT OF COMPARING ist, an illustrator of river life, even though, as art historians are well aware, his depictions are As a purely practical artist who wanted to filled with both the specific and the conceptual sell his paintings, Bingham may have inten­ vocabulary of conventional European art. J. D. tionally blended elements of familiar European Prown has called Bingham a history painter art with his American subject matter in order to recording his own time.18 While this assessment combine for his viewer the comforting security may stretch the bounds of history painting of a familiar visual tradition and the novel, the rather dangerously, it does suggest something unconventional, and the distinctively local and important about the manner in which Bing­ particular. This is not to suggest that we should ham's pictures combine history and fancy-even overlook or discount the fact that Bingham mythology of a sort-for the viewer. Moreover, invested a great deal of time and effort in if we recall the vogue of illustrated travel-books studying the works of the masters, whether in in the mid-nineteenth century, we can also the original or in reproductions and engravings, begin to appreciate how the apparently partic­ and that he would naturally have embodied ularized localism of Bingham's pictures would many elements of what he studied in his own have satisfied a definable market need. works. Such appropriation of his predecessors is Here, then, is a case in which "market appeal" particularly obvious in terms of design, where appears to be a factor in influence relations. As Bingham's fondness for pyramidal and triangu­ Bloch has pointed out, Bingham accommodated lar construction attests to the tenacity with his subjects to the announced wishes of the which he clung to this classicizing element of American Art Union, which had already in­ design. formed one painter (Frederick E. Cohen) that Rudolf Zeitler has called attention to what it was most interested in pictures "taken from he terms the dualistic nature of many early every day scenes of life, those that are not sug­ nineteenth-century paintings in which a fore­ gestive of, or create painful emotions.... Any­ ground formed by everyday circumstances thing, however, that illustrates our country.,,19 serves as a sort of "runway" or point of depar­ What was wanted, in other words, was pleasant ture for a dreamlike yearning that is projected nationalistic pictorialism that would engage into a distance full of mystery.21 This interest the viewer without threatening her or him. It in combining within a single work elements of was the sort of prescription Bingham was par­ the real and the fantastic-the "here" and the ticularly well suited to address. Indeed, we have "not-here" -was common among Romantic only to note the number of figures who look artists in all the media. With Bingham, though, directly at us from his canvasses to get a sense as with many of the painters of the West, Zeit­ of how well Bingham understood the use of eye ler's formulation might quite properly be re­ contact as a device for generating viewer in­ versed. For the eastern or European viewer volvement. Once the Art Union had shown to whom the western subject matter is essen­ interest in Bingham's western subjects, even tially foreign, what is familiar in a painting like having his 1846 Jolly Flatboatmen (fig. 4) the Fur Traders is not the foreground but rather engraved for their membership; once those pic­ the background. In addressing his audience on tures had begun to attract serious attention; its own familiar visual terms, Bingham employs ORIGINALITY AND INFLUENCE IN GEORGE CALEB BINGHAM'S ART 31

FIG. 4. George Caleb Bingham, The Jolly Flatboatmen (1). , Wash­ ington; Lent by the Pell Family Trust, Hon. Claiborne Pell, Trustee.

that idiom either in the landscape setting that communicate, the artist requires a vocabulary. brackets his main subject or in the traditional But that vocabulary is only part of the com­ iconography or visual arrangement that under­ municative process, for the artist requires as lies or articulates his subject. Such a combination well an audience capable of understanding what of the traditional and the new is unavoidable he or she would communicate. There must be in this sort of art. some common ground- some shared vocabu­ In a sense, Bingham's situation was typical lary-to make such communication possible. for American artists in the early years who This shared vocabulary, I would suggest, was wished to paint distinctively American subjects. for Bingham, and for many others, part of the Even as late as 1845-the year Bingham sub­ accumulated language of European representa­ mitted his western subjects to the American tional art. Art Union-American artists had not yet devel­ We return to the point raised in relation oped a full painterly vocabulary endemic to both to Manet's Luncheon on the Grass and to what we might broadly term "the American Bingham's late Jolly Flatboatmen: the relation experience." Hence they naturally reached back of the borrowed materials to the new work. to the European visual tradition in search of a Does the novelty of the western subject matter sort of artistic skeleton upon which a distinc­ make the conventionality of the work's form tively "American" art might be assembled. To (or the particular borrowed details of its form) 32 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, WINTER 1985

an embarrassment to the work, an intrusive of both. If Bingham's eastern viewers perceived advertisement of its indebtedness? Depending the artist's use of European precursors, they upon how one feels about the aesthetic validity might have engaged in just this kind of compar­ of such borrowing, the question might be ative activity, and it is entirely possible that the answered in either the negative or the affll'ma­ distinctively American (or western) aspects of tive. It seems clear that Bingham's borrowings the pictures might have benefited most, owing of details like the dancing satyr or the waving partly to their novelty for the eastern viewer handkerchief are probably best regarded as and partly to their service as visual confirma­ convenient appropriations of visual images­ tion or clarification of impressions and assump­ shortcuts, as it were. Yet if the satyr figure was tions the viewer had generated from his or her as common in America as Bloch claims, and if reading of sensationalized or romanticized ma­ Gericault's Raft was already widely known, terials about the West. Since the conventions of then Bingham must surely have realized that in European art would have in some sense provided employing those details so obviously in "atten­ the standards by which the viewer assessed the tion positions" (both appear at the apex of a picture, that viewer would have been confronted compositional triangle) he was inviting his with some striking exceptions to those conven­ viewers to recognize and recall the models upon tions-for instance, there are few fur traders or which he had drawn.22 dancing flatboatmen to be seen in conventional All paintings involve us at some level in an European art. In a new republic less than a cen­ activity of comparing: we "decode" or "trans­ tury old, this discovery of a national subject late" messages of any sort by matching their matter distinct from its European antecedents details with material already within our general would not have been without significance to knowledge. But when we enter the field of "in­ an eastern artistic Establishment that was itself fluence studies," we tend to look more care­ part of an expanding America already begin­ fully for any and all such correspondences. The ning to see itself as a major political and artistic problem with this sort of visual sleuthing is power. We define by likening and by differen­ that we may get so carried away by our enthusi­ tiating, and Bingham's pictures may be seen to asm for the task at hand that we begin to find stimulate both activities in service to the latter. connections even where none exist. That is, coming at the visually analogous material with POLITICS AND BINGHAM'S ART a particularly aggressive comparative mind-set, we may in fact impose relationships ("influ­ One area of American public activity in which ences"), almost in defiance of the facts or logic continuities and discontinuities with European of the works we are considering. Something precedents are clearly apparent is politics. And like this might reasonably be said about my it was a series of political paintings executed at placing the Friedrich painting beside the Fur mid-century that generated perhaps the greatest Traders and thus seeming to suggest a relation­ interest in Bingham's art. The best known of ship that does not really exist. these, The County Election (fig. 5), was painted Yet the fact remains that in looking at any in 1851-52, with another version following picture that suggests another we tend to recall later in 1852. In this picture some of the prin­ that precursor work-or to recreate it in our cipal matters we have been considering appear memories, since we normally have neither the to converge. First, the picture was immediately original nor a reproduction in hand when we popular when it was exhibited, as we know not encounter the new work. Such a comparison only from newspaper reports but also from the actually benefits both works, for it leads us to fact that a number of keys were issued that pur­ consider each not only by itself but also in rela­ ported to identify the figures that populate the tion to the other, sometimes even producing in picture.23 Again, it is scarcely surprising to dis­ our minds a third, hybrid version that partakes cover that Bingham turned to a model for his ORIGINALITY AND INFLUENCE IN GEORGE CALEB BINGHAM'S ART 33 picture-in this case William Hogarth's Canvas­ sources but also from distinctively localized sing for Votes (fig. 6), a work Bingham probably ones. The child seated at the left foreground of knew in its common engraved state, in which The County Election, for instance, recalls a the right-left orientation corresponds to that of small classical sculpture "that was especially Bingham's picture. We can easily see how much popular in Bingham's time, both in engraving as Bingham has taken from Hogarth: the street well as in small scale reproduction.,,25 At the that recedes toward an open landscape in the same time, other paintings such as Stump left background, the refreshment table at the Speaking (1853) and Canvassing for a Vote left, the three figures beside the porch that (1852) reflect the iconography of1o~al election echo Hogarth's three standing men, and the campaign posters.26 Both the teasing invitation triangular construction executed in "levels" or to the viewer to identify the figures and the bands and rising to its apex on the porch at the clear reference to Hogarth-if not specifically right. to Canvassing for Votes, then at least to the plexner attributes the strongest influence election series generally-reflect Bingham's im­ upon Bingham's painting to the work of the plicit suggestion that the viewer do some com­ German immigrant (1789- paring, not just of pictures but oflarger, perhaps 1821), whose two paintings, Election Day at national (or nationalistic) issues. the State House and Fourth of July in Center What emerges from such a comparison, Square, were at the Academy briefly, is a sense that the American situation is when Bingham was in Philadelphia.24 Behind to be preferred to the European. Barbara S. both Bingham's and Krimmel's pictures, though, Groseclose has called Bingham's manner in the lie Hogarth's widely circulated election engrav­ election pictures "sardonic, almost Hogarthian ings, and this fact raises yet another important thrusts at the foibles of factional politics.,,27 issue in influence studies: the role of interme­ The "almost" is important, for as Plexner ob­ diate works. That is, suppose Bingham had not serves, Bingham's treatment of his subject differs seen the Hogarth, but had obtained his visual from the often cynical, even misanthropic view material from the work of an intermediate we find in Hogarth: artist (in this case Krimmel) who had used the Hogarth? Which artist, then, is the source of the All the elements needed for devastating satire "influence" upon Bingham? In an active artistic are portrayed-windbags and office-holding community, whether local or worldwide, this humbugs, wily or smug; voters idiotic or kind of "cross-pollination" occurs continually, disreputable, usually drunken; liquor flowing to the frequent despair of source-hunters. The at the polls-yet all is recorded with such important point for the present discussion is to admiration as a doting father lavishes on a distinguish between borrowings of form (visual spirited urchin come home filthy and with structures) and borrowings of, or overt refer­ his pocket full of frogs. 28 ences to, content (visual statements). In Bing­ ham's election pictures, it is the latter sort of 'plexner's hyperbole aside, the point is essen­ visual connection that yields the most intriguing tially correct: these paintings, like many other suggestions about the artist's intentions. While mid-century expressions of American national­ Bingham's political paintings may in fact owe ism, are full of the self-satisfied optimism so something to Krimmel's works, it would have often regarded as the very spirit of Jacksonian been Hogarth's engravings rather than Krim­ democracy. Measured against the precedents of mel's canvasses that were more immediately European art and decorum, the American available to Bingham after he departed phila­ experience (both in art and as art) is coming to delphia in 1838. be seen as inherently more vital, expansive even Bingham's election pictures are, in fact, full to the point of explosiveness. At moments of of materials borrowed not just from academic cultural intersection-moments naturally suited 34 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, WINTER 1985

FIG. 5. George Caleb Bingham, The County Election. St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis. to representation in the arts and perhaps most Flexner claims that Bingham lost his spark of engagingly (if condescendingly) recorded in in­ originality at about the same time that he numerable pictures of bewildered aboriginals traveled to Paris and Dusseldorf (in 1855-59), confronting the authors and artifacts of "civi­ and that he subsequently became infected with lized" society-the invited act of comparison what Flexner calls "the artificialities of the cannot but result in a preference for the new. German genre style," so much so that later In an environment of increasingly self-con­ efforts such as this picture recast the originally gratulatory nationalism, the artist can and does lively flatboatmen as "theatrical figures posing raise such moments of shared preference-by­ with conscious grace." Yet E. M. Bloch regards choice almost to the status of mythology. the same painting as the "culmination of [Bing­ Bingham is clearly engaging in this sort of activ­ ham's 1 progression and developing maturity," ity in his western pictures. seeing in the figure arrangement not contriv­ ance but "a far more fluid, less contrived INFLUENCE AND INDEPENDENCE movement [that is 1 felt throughout the work [and 1 which reveals the mature artist. ,,30 In Finally, I should like to point to another many ways the responses of these two critics vision of the flatboatmen, this one Jolly Flat­ reflect their own standards of taste and de­ boatmen in Port (fig. 7), done in 1857. This is corum-the "spectacles" through which they one of those later works that some critics, in­ observe the picture-perhaps more than they cluding J. T. Flexner, dismiss as dull failures. reflect Bingham's painting itself. Flexner's ORIGINALITY AND INFLUENCE IN GEORGE CALEB BINGHAM'S ART 35

FIG. 6. William Hogarth, Canvassing for Votes. Stephen C. Behrendt.

taste reflects his interest in American primitive academic figure-group is not "natural," nor can art, while Bloch's represents his training in it be made natural simply by inserting it into classical art. Flexner's concern with convention, an otherwise natural visual setting. We might with what in the picture is like what has been see the conflict here as one between academ­ done elsewhere, deflects attention away from icism and "naturalness"; but we might regard what is different. Bloch, on the other hand, it also as a difference between alternate varie­ seems to take the picture more on its own ties of academicism. The wild landscape garden terms: although he too recognizes the picture's of the American wilderness (however defined) debts, he sees as well what is distinctive and is not, after all, the orderly, "civilized" (and innovative about the melding of original and in­ hence manipulated or "tamed") landscape herited materials. garden of Versailles. Just as the American land­ Flexner's objection is, nonetheless, one that scape is ultimately not fully reducible to the deserves attention. If the inclusion of an aca­ visual vocabulary of European landscape art, demic figure-study group or an amalgamation so is much of the language of nineteenth­ of several such groups disturbs a picture that is century American subject matter likewise irre­ aiming to be realistic, then the artist may in­ ducible. deed have failed in his or her effort, for an We come back, then, to the matter of just 36 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, WINTER 1985

FIG. 7. George Caleb· Bingham, The Jolly Flatboatmen in Port. St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis. what we mean by "influence" and how we distinctively American strain of visual art, it is determine what, if anything, an artist wishes us worth asking ourselves whether the connections to make of his or her discernible borrowings we observe between their work and that of from the inherited language of visual art. My their European predecessors are not in fact primary concern here has been to raise what I often the inevitable result of a groping for see as some of the more important questions existing forms, or paradigms, by and through concerning influence studies as they apply to which to regulate and communicate their percep­ the art of George Caleb Bingham. With the tions and their inventions. Just as the subjects artists of the West who have taken both con­ of the Bingham paintings we have considered crete and conceptual materials from other here are acts of community, so too is the making artists, we always need to determine whether of art an act of implied community with one's the borrowing is a matter of formal reference­ audience. As I indicated earlier, such community what in literary studies is customarily called interaction requires a basis in a shared language­ allusion, or the deliberate invocation of both a in this case the language of art, a visual lan­ precursor work and the context supplied by guage that is predominantly European but, like that precursor. If allusion seems not to be the any living language, continually receptive to purpose, then we need to decide what is. expansion and modification by the incorpora­ In the case of artists like Bingham and others tion of new materials. Studying an American who were directly involved in the forging of a painting that invites the viewer to contrast what ORIGINALITY AND INFLUENCE IN GEORGE CALEB BINGHAM'S ART 37 is, now (i.e., American) with what was, then agery, Land of Promise: The European Image (i.e., European) may lead that viewer into a of the American Frontier in the Nineteenth variety of acts of discrimination and judgment, Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981). not the least of which is likely to be an increas­ 4. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: ing preference for what is now, what is new. A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford Uni­ Such pictures, I believe, provide simultaneous versity Press, 1973). Most directly related is Walter Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past reminders of continuity and discontinuity, of and the English Poet (New York: W. W. Nor­ likeness and difference, both within the actual ton, 1972). sphere of the viewer's own experience and with­ 5. See also the relationship of "parallels" in the broader, less "place-conscious" realm of and "analogies" as discussed by Ulrich Weis­ formal art. The decision by American painters stein in "Literature and the Visual Arts," Inter­ to give prominent place in their work to indig­ relations of Literature, ed. Jean-Pierre Barricelli enous American subject matter is analogous to and Joseph Gibaldi (New York: Modern Lan­ William Words~orth's radical choice of "hum­ guage Association of America, 1982), especially ble" subject matter for his poems in the land­ pp.265-67. mark Lyrical Ballads of 1798, a decision that 6. The subject of artistic influence in general advanced the democratization of the arts even is far too broad for survey here. A particularly as it substantially expanded the range of subject useful and important discussion of the varieties of influence is Goran Hermeren's Influence in matter henceforth to be regarded as "appro­ Art and Literature (Princeton: Princeton Uni­ priate" to formal art. To turn to "national" versity Press, 1975). A good documentary subject matter was, for American artists such as survey of the matter of visual influence is K. E. Bingham, an act at once patriotic and radical, a Maison's Art Themes and Variations: Five Cen­ declaration of national as well as artistic inde­ turies of Interpretations and Re-Creations pendence well suited to the self-confident poli­ (New York: Harry N. Abrams, [1960]). I have tical, intellectual, and artistic expansionism discussed one aspect of the phenomenon in that characterized the nation on the eve of the "The Best Criticism: Imitation as Criticism in Civil War. the Eighteenth Century," The Eighteenth Cen­ tury: Theory and Interpretation 24 (1983): 3-22, and have provided an extended example NOTES in The Moment of Explosion: Blake and the 1. Ironically, as Barbara S. Groseclose has Illustration of Milton (Lincoln: University of observed, it was that very neoclassical artist Nebraska Press, 1983). A more particular exam­ 's emphasis on the contemporary ination of the incorporation of a European and the particular that inaugurated the modern visual model into Great Plains art is Rena A. replacement of the past by the present in the Coen's "David's Sabine Women in the wild subject matter of painting. See "Painting, Poli­ West," Great Plains Quarterly 2 (1982): 67-76. tics, and George Caleb Bingham," American Art 7. Hermeren, Influence, p. 321. Journal 10 (November 1978): 18. 8. I refer to the painting here by its more 2. Rasselas (1759), in Johnson: Poetry and familiar title. In a recent article Henry Adams Prose, ed. Mona Wilson (Cambridge, Mass.: argues persuasively that this painting's original Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 410. See title provides strong evidence for considering also Reynolds's Discourses on Art (1769-90; the painting as a companion pendant to Indian first published together in 1797), Burke's essay Figure-Concealed Enemy. See Henry Adams, on the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), "A New Interpretation of Bingham's Fur Traders Wordsworth's expanded preface to the second Descending the Missouri," Art Bulletin 65 edition of Lyrical Ballads (1802), and Gilpin's (1983): 675-80. several rambles on the picturesque in his "tours" 9. Adams, "New Interpretation," p. 678. (1789-1804). This Claudian strain is countered in Indian 3. These latter, related trends are treated at Figure-Concealed Enemy with the rugged, ir­ length in Ray Allen Billington's Land of Sav- regular landscape typical of Salvator Rosa. 38 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, WINTER 1985

Rosa's work formed the stylistic opposite to home, that are at present to be enjoyed here." Claude's serenity, a point widely discussed by John Francis McDermott, George Caleb Bing­ theorists and connoisseurs in the eighteenth ham: River Portraitist (Norman: University of century. As Adams notes, both Claude and Oklahoma Press, 1959), p. 29. Rosa seem to have reached the height of their 15. Bloch, Evolution of an Artist, p. 41. popularity in America in the 1840s. The letter is dated 9 September 1877. 10. James Thomas Flexner, That Wilder 16. Cited by Martin C. Battestin, ed., Pref­ Image: The Painting of America's Native School ace to Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews and from Thomas Cole to Winslow Homer (New Shamela (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), York: Bonanza Books, 1962), p. 150. p. xix. 11. Helmut Borsch-Supan, Caspar David 17. Henry Vyverberg, The Living Tradition: Friedrich, trans. Sarah Twohig (New York: Art, Music, and Ideas in the Western World (New George Braziller, 1974), pp. 122,12. York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978), 12. I am deliberately sidestepping the prob­ p.255. lem of this painting's date. E. Maurice Bloch, 18. Jules David Prown, American Painting: the leading authority on Bingham's art, initially From Its Beginnings to the Armory Show dated the picture ca. 1848, despite Bingham's (Lausanne and Geneva: Skira, 1969), p. 84. reference in an 1878 letter to being engaged in 19. Bloch, Evolution of an Artist, p. 81. "finishing" a version of this subject; George 20. Ibid., p. 87. Caleb Bingham: The Evolution of an Artist 21. Rudolf Zeitler, Die Kunst des neun­ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967) zehnten Jahrhunderts; cited by Mario Praz in and George Caleb Bingham: A Catalogue Rai­ Mnemosyne: The Parallel between Literature sonne (Berkeley: University of California Press, and the Visual Arts (Princeton: Princeton Uni­ 1967), p. 62. Writing later, in The Drawings of versity Press, 1970), p. 159. George Caleb Bingham, with a Catalogue Rai­ 22. Bloch, Evolution of an Artist, p. 94. sonne (Columbia: Press, 23. Ibid., pp. 139-46. 1975), Bloch offers a compromise solution to 24. Flexner, That Wilder Image, pp. 145- the dating problem, saying "the painting could 46. Bloch, incidentally, refers us both to Ho­ have been in progress over a considerable period, garth and to David Wilkie's Chelsea Pensioners with the artist refurbishing it after a lapse of Reading the Gazette of the Battle of Waterloo some years in order to make it ready for exhibi­ (1822); Evolution of an Artist, p. 148. tion" (p. 247). 25. Bloch, Evolution of an Artist, p. 154. 13. The sculpture is reproduced in Bloch, The sculpture is reproduced as plate 98. Evolution of an Artist, plate 57. 26. See Groseclose, "Painting, Politics, and 14. Bloch, Evolution of an Artist, p. 94. Bingham," pp. 5-19. Indeed, Bingham may have owned some of these 27. Ibid., p. 6. reproductions himself, judging from a remark in 28. Flexner, That Wilder Image, p. 147. a letter he wrote to his wife from Philadelphia 29. J. T. Flexner, Nineteenth Century Amer­ in 1838: "I have just been purchasing a lot of ican Painting (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, drawings and engravings, and also a lot of casts 1970), p. 96. from antique sculpture which will give me near­ 30. Bloch, Evolution of an Artist, pp. 94- ly the same advantages in my drawing studies at 95; emphases mine.