Existing comment:
George Caleb Bingham, 1811-1879
George Caleb Bingham moved with his family to the Missouri frontier in 1819. The young Bingham soon earned his living as a portraitist, augmenting his studies in Philadelphia in the late 1830s. By the early 1850s his anecdotal scenes depicting life along the sparsely settled Mississippi River, such as The Jolly Flatboatmen, were regarded as pictorial embodiments of the romance of the American wilderness. Bingham painted this self-portrait on a quarter-plate sheet of copper, which was intended as a support for a daguerreotype. He probably made it as a private memento for one of his kinsmen, for it belonged to family members for many years.
Self-portait, 1849/50 |