[1] Initially a Whig, he was elected as a delegate to the Missouri legislature before the American Civil War where he fought against the extension of slavery westward.

During that war, although born in Virginia, Bingham was dedicated to the Union cause and became captain of a volunteer company which helped keep the state from joining the Confederacy, and then served four years as Missouri's Treasurer.

His sole childhood exposure to a working artist was as a nine-year-old boy, when famed American portraitist Chester Harding visited Franklin looking for business, having recently sketched Daniel Boone in Warren County, Missouri (Boone's sons owned a salt spring and manufactured salt in Howard County).

[6] On December 23, 1823, Bingham's father Henry, who had initially opened a tavern in Franklin and in 1821 become the judge of the Howard County Court, died of malaria at the age of thirty-eight.

The young sons barely kept their small farm in nearby Saline County afloat, in part with the help of their father's brother John, who had moved to the area and donated half the land which became Arrow Rock.

[1] At age sixteen, the young Bingham was apprenticed to cabinet maker Jesse Green in nearby Boonville in Cooper County.

After Green moved away (a major flood of the Missouri River having destroyed much of Franklin and other riverside towns in 1827), Bingham apprenticed with another cabinet maker, Justinian Williams.

While under their tutelage, Bingham studied religious texts, preached at camp meetings and thought about becoming a minister in his Baptist Church (in which he would remain active throughout his life).

[6] His elder brother Matthias Bingham would travel to Texas to fight for its independence in 1836, and remain in Mexico until his death in 1861, becoming a large landowner in the process but never marrying.

Several prominent local citizens visited his studio for portraits, including the lawyer James S. Rollins of Columbia, Missouri, who became a lifelong friend as well as a powerful politician in the state.

[11][10] Bingham then spent nearly five years in Washington, D.C., where he painted portraits of various politicians, including former president John Quincy Adams, who had become a member of Congress and famous abolitionist.

[14] In 1856, two years after the tumultuous creation of the Kansas Territory, Bingham traveled to Europe for an extensive tour with his second wife Eliza and youngest daughter.

First they stayed in Paris for several months, where Bingham fulfilled a long-cherished desire and studied the Old Masters at the Louvre Museum, likely his chief reason for going abroad.

Bingham lived and worked among the American and German artists of the art colony, among whom was the German-American Emanuel Leutze, the most prominent historical painter in the United States.

Leutze was unusual for living in both countries and had an open studio in Düsseldorf, where he welcomed Bingham as a friend and already successful artist.

While in Germany, Bingham worked on important commissions from the Missouri State Legislature of Presidents Washington and Jefferson (later destroyed by fire), as well as independent paintings.

Bingham, as a dedicated Union man, raised troops to oppose Jackson and his appointed ally, Major General Sterling Price, and was commissioned as a captain.

Jackson refused to accept his deposition, instead declaring Missouri a "Free Republic" on August 5 and traveling to Richmond, Virginia, to confer with Confederate officials.

In 1934, the St. Louis Art Museum held a retrospective exhibition of his work, and others noticed his depictions of ordinary people from the middle of the previous century.

Painted around 1845 in the style called luminism by some historians of American art, it was originally entitled, French Trader, Half-breed Son.

It reflected the reality of fur trappers and traders frequently marrying Native American women in their territories; in Canada the ethnic Métis people have been recognized by the government as a distinct group with status similar to First Nations.

[26] The reference to Marmaduke in The County Election was only relative to Missouri, so in order to generalize the message of the painting to the nation, Bingham removed the two men tossing a coin in the print version.

The "Outstanding Citizen", as Bingham's sketch refers to him, represents the past as the man's sharp edges and fine clothes show how he is unwilling to bend his beliefs and instead works among the people.

The "Stump Speaker" appears to be swaying the assembled crowd by bending to the people's desires, shown by the curving arm that is outstretched to the audience.

[14] The George Caleb Bingham Catalogue Raisonné Supplement Of Paintings & Drawings was begun in 2005, directed and edited by art historian Fred R. Kline with initial advisory board members Paul Nagel and William Kloss.

Constitutional law versus Vigilantism in the Western regions of the U.S.), Baiting the Hook (Bingham's first river genre), Young Fisherman, Hudson River Palisades (Bingham's only known Hudson River painting); and portraits including Colin Dunlop & His Dog, Lewis Allen Dicken Crenshaw, Fanny Smith Crenshaw, Frederick Moss Prewitt, Civil War Lt. Col. Levi Pritchard (Bingham's largest portrait at 80 inches high), Charles Chilton, Samuel Chilton, Thomas B. Hudson, Missouri Steamboat Capt.

Joseph Kinney and Martha Lykins, a previously unidentified woman who has now been recognized as Bingham's third wife, painted years before their marriage.

Nearly all Bingham's over 500 recorded paintings (460 are portraits) are unsigned, including famous ones such as Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, The Emigration of Daniel Boone, and The County Election.

The GCBCRS is sponsored by Rachael Cozad Fine Art in Kansas City with publication in book form planned for the near future.