Tags
19th century, George Caleb Bingham, Karl Bodmer, landscape, light, Missouri River, paintings, weather
I don’t know about you, but the end of winter often seems harder than the beginning: will this ever end? The snow begins to melt, the dirt turns to mud and you’re walking on ice suspended in pudding. It’s claustrophobic.
George Caleb Bingham (American, 1811–1879). Boatmen on the Missouri, 1846. Oil on canvas. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1979.7.15
The weather turns here and the lid finally comes off the sky and reveals that blue above and I think of the vistas of the west, the fields that open up along the rivers of the center of this continent, the fields rough with corn stubble punctuated by trees that pass your car window like drum beats in a song, so regular.
I wonder about the people in the past, wonder what they thought and knew about. Of course it was different for the uneducated and the poor then as now, but if you were wealthy, oh, the places you could go.
Karl Bodmer (Swiss, 1809-1893),
White Castles on the Missouri , 1833
watercolor on paper, 9 x 16 3/8 in.; 22.86 x 41.59 cm
gift of Enron Art Foundation, Joslyn Art Museum, 1986.49.176
At the dawn of time back in Missouri, I never had the pleasure to hold but I did get to order 8×10 color transparencies* of things as wonderful as the Karl Bodmer watercolors of the trip he took up the Missouri River, and George Caleb Bingham’s Fur Traders Descending the Missouri.
Art history classes will teach you to recognize painters and images, styles and eras, but they won’t teach you the kind of seeing you can only get by being in the same place at the same time in the same light.
Fur Traders Descending the Missouri. Oil on canvas, George Caleb Bingham, 1845. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 33.61
Far from the wide Missouri, I have to be content with images in books and the internet, but I can tell you from looking: Bingham got it right. The sky really does look like that above those rivers and plains; the light is rosy and grey at once, the river swift and glassy. I don’t know how it works, I only know how happy it makes me.
Come, spring: bring us the river and the light.
*Yes, and we had the printers run separations and then FedExed them to other museums for approval. Can you imagine!
And, if you’re handy to the place, the St Louis Art Museum (SLAM) is having a Bingham show.
Kitty Calash 
Though I’m right here in town, I still haven’t made it to the Bingham exhibition! Plan on doing that next week during Spring Break.
Growing up in Texas, I knew wide vistas, but always thought the paintings of the Mississippi Valley were ridiculously romantic, with fluffy trees and soft, rosy light. Then I moved here, and found I was living in that landscape–it was real! Oddly, though, the sky seems somehow “closer” here than in Texas…
It looks like a good exhibit; I hope you can get to see it.
I worked in north Texas one summer; I know what you mean. Flying into DFW was surreal! I had never seen country so big. The landscape isn’t so much flat as it is flayed. Rhode Island was really a shocking contrast to that.
I didn’t believe the Hudson Valley school paintings until I saw them, either; pretty incredible how well those otherwise romanticized landscapes and scenes capture light.