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Game of Checkers
Checkers Artist George Caleb Bingham
George Caleb Bingham
1811 – 1879
Augusta County, Virginia
 Self-portraits 
1835 1850
The Checker Players
Oil
1850
- A self taught realist painter whose oil paintings clearly depicted the genre of every day early American frontier life along the Missouri River in the mid 19th century.
- His sole childhood exposure to art was at age 9, when famed American portraitist, Chester Harding, visited Bingham’s hometown on business, and George assisted Harding during his brief stay; this experience left a powerful impression on the young boy.
- At the age of sixteen, Bingham apprenticed with cabinetmaker Jesse Green and then after Green moved, he apprenticed with another cabinetmaker, Justinian Williams; both tradesmen were Methodist ministers and, while under their tutelage, George studied religious texts and thought about becoming a minister, but then he also considered becoming a lawyer.
- However, by age nineteen, Bingham finally realized that he truly wanted to become an artist and by this time, his portraits were selling for $20.00 a piece.
- By 1838, George was already beginning to make a name for himself as a portrait artist in St. Louis, his studio visited by several prominent local citizens and statesmen.
- In the same year, to further his education, George spent three months in Philadelphia and here he created his first genre painting entitled ‘Western Boatman Ashore’ and then he continued on to New York to visit the National Academy of Design exhibition.
- Bingham’s best known subjects were the masculine world of river boatmen and rural politics that he depicted in well composed, candid genre paintings as in leisurely activities such as a simple checkers game amongst friends, but he also painted portraits and landscapes.
- Although he had a technical facility for painting, Bingham’s early works were rather stiff and somewhat staid in style, despite the strong expression, as is seen in his self portrait of 1835.
- Among his earliest and finest genre paintings was Fur Traders Descending the Missouri (1845), which depicted a man and a boy in a canoe in early morning.
- Gradually his stylized portraits and genre scenes developed into an expression that was deeper and more insightful, where some of the paintings depicted a dreamy lyricism and romanticized emotion.
- In his oil painting of 1850, The Checker Players, he used a rather traditional triangular composition for his characters, but he infused the canvas with dramatic lighting to highlight the checkers players and the spectator against a dark background and in doing so he drew the viewer’s focus to the checkers game, the cheerful mood and content facial expressions as well as the naturalistic pose of the players around the checkerboard.
- Bingham depicted every day common people in daily chores, routines or leisurely past times in a dignified and often noble manner.
- His best narratives were political paintings and historical commentary that were created between 1845 and 1856 and his canvases of life on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers were revealing, humorous and lyrical; most of the men in these paintings were idle, and the serenity of the river was in strong contrast to his riotous political scenes; his three major political paintings, County Election (1852), Stump Speaking (1854), and Verdict of the People (1855), were liberally filled with men talking or listening, while drinking or drunk.
- From 1856 to 1859, Bingham studied art with the members of the Dusseldorf School, Germany; however, some critics believe that this exposure to a different mode of art expression caused him to abandon his earlier rustic American style; later depictions lacked the clarity and vitality of his earlier works.
- Upon his return, in his latter years he spent his time in portrait painting and politics, where he held several different positions, but 1877 he was appointed professor of art at the University of Missouri; his involvement in Missouri politics led to many portrait commissions.
- During his lifetime he was best known as a politician and portrait painter, rather than as the master of genre he is considered today.
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