George Caleb Bingham.

This past fall has seen the publication of some excellent books, not only about the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but also about American and modern art. One of the best of these is George Caleb Bingham, which the St. Louis Art Museum, in conjunction with Harry Abrams, brought out to coincide with an exhibition that appeared in Washington and elsewhere. The book, comprising essays by Paul Nagel, John Wilmerding, and three other scholars, is lavishly illustrated with those luminous works that make the artist one of the most authentic of American masters. By the time this eminent Missourian died in 1879, at the age of 68, he had lived to see America transformed from an agrarian to a largely industrialized society, the diverse regions of whose farflung territory were connected by steamships and a complex web of railroads. His finest works, from a few years before and after 1850, are the swan song of a part of America that was passing away even before the paint dried upon his finely woven canvases. In Canvassing the Vote, Verdict of the People, and County Politician, Bingham has captured the lively novelty of civic association in the young Republic. Bingham was one of art history's few provincial geniuses. Even the most gifted provincials are usually superficial, and if they are geniuses, they tend to be seduced into yielding to the grand manner of the capital. Bingham has seen and studied the Old Masters, Gerrit Dou, the followers of Caravaggio, and so forth, and his paintings reflect this. Yet mercifully, and in spite of his best efforts to the contrary, he was never able to pass for the finely polished cosmopolitan artist he wanted to be. There is always something crude and gauche about these paintings, with their sharp, overly obvious chiaroscuro and fulgurant hues, resembling nothing else in the art of America or Europe.

Yet they have, in their own way, an extraordinary formal sophistication. Consider the finely felt ovals and triangulations of the group of four seated men in Canvassing for a Vote, which inadvertently possesses the elegance of Giotto, and which looks forward to the apples and flasks of Cezanne; or the dramatic Caravaggesque moodiness of the shadowy figures in Captured Indians. Some of these works come close to sublimity. You can almost hear the stilled music of The Jolly Bargeman, in which a mercurial young man, suspended in mid-leap, his rainbow of garments aflame in the noonday sun, is accompanied by the joyous clapping and vociferations of his companions on a barge gliding down the broad river. Few images communicate meditative repose more effectively than Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, lazily motionless on the warm and shimmering turquoise waters.