1811-1879 George Caleb Bingham Gallery George Caleb Bingham (March 20, 1811 ?C July 7, 1879) was an American artist, whose work depicted his view of American life in the frontier lands along the Missouri River. Left to languish in obscurity, Bingham's work was rediscovered in the 1930s and he is now widely considered one of the greatest American painters of the 1800s. Born in Augusta County, Virginia, Bingham was the second of seven children born to Henry Vest Bingham and Mary Amend. Upon their marriage, Matthias Amend, Mary's father, gave ownership to the family mill, 1,180 acres of land and several slaves to Henry with the agreement that Matthias could live with the family the rest of his life. Henry offered the land and mill as surety for a friend's debt and, when the friend died in 1818, all was lost. George's family soon moved to Franklin, Missouri "where the land was said to be bountiful, fertile and cheap." Bingham was a self-taught artist. His sole childhood exposure to the field 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. George assisted Harding during his brief stay, an experience that left a powerful impression. In 1823, Bingham's father, now judge of Howard County Court, died of malaria on December 26 at the age of thirty-eight. To keep the family going, Mary Bingham opened a school for girls and George, then twelve, worked as school janitor to help keep the family afloat. At age sixteen, Bingham apprenticed with cabinet maker Jesse Green. After Green moved, he apprenticed with another cabinet maker, Justinian Williams. Both tradesmen were Methodist ministers and, while under their tutelage, Bingham studied religious texts, preached at camp meetings and thought about becoming a minister himself. Bingham also considered becoming a lawyer. However, by age nineteen, Bigham was painting portraits for $20.00 apiece, often completing the works in a single day. He drummed up work in both Franklin and Arrow Rock and, while his painting abilities were still developing, succeeded in impressing his patrons with his strong draftsmanship and ability to capture the likeness of his subject. Soon Bingham attempted to travel to St. Louis to ply his trade but contracted measles, which left him weak and permanently bald. In 1836, Bingham married Sarah Elizabeth Hutchison, who bore him three children over the subsequent twelve years before dying at the age of twenty-nine. George married twice more, first to Eliza Thomas, who died in a mental institution in 1876, and then to Martha Lykins, who lived until 1890. George's mother, Mary, died in 1851. By 1838, Bingham 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, including the lawyer James S. Rollins who was to become a life-long friend. To further his education, George spent three months in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania before continuing on to New York City to visit the National Academy of Design exhibition. Bingham was elected to the Missouri General Assembly in 1848. From 1856 to 1859, Bingham studied art with the members of the D??sseldorf School in D??sseldorf, Germany. Critics claim that this caused him to abandon the rustic American style in his art. Upon his return, he began painting less, turning to politics in the post-Civil War years and serving as state treasurer and adjutant general. He was also president of the Board of Police Commissioners for Kansas City, Missouri in 1874, appointing the first chief of police there . Toward the end of his life he was a professor of art at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri.  Related Paintings of George Caleb Bingham :. | The Jolly Flatboatmen | The Puzzled Witness | Shooting for the Beef | Bootsleute auf dem Missouri | Portrait of Vinnie Ream |
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Bartolomeo Manfredi
(baptised 25 August 1582 - 12 December 1622) was an Italian painter, a leading member of the Caravaggisti (followers of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio) of the early 17th century. Manfredi was born in Ostiano, near Cremona. He may have been a pupil of Caravaggio in Romeat his famous libel trial in 1603 Caravaggio mentioned that a certain Bartolomeo, accused of distributing scurrilous poems attacking Caravaggio's detested rival Baglione, had been a servant of his. Certainly the Bartolomeo Manfredi known to art history was a close follower of Caravaggio's innovatory style, with its enhanced chiaroscuro and insistence on naturalism, with a gift for story-telling through expression and body-language. Caravaggio in his brief careerehe rocketed to fame in 1600, was exiled from Rome in 1606, and was dead by 1610 had a profound effect on the younger generation of artists, particularly in Rome and Naples. And of these Caravaggisti (followers of Caravaggio), Manfredi seems in turn to have been the most influential in transmitting the master's legacy to the next generation, particularly with painters from France and the Netherlands who came to Italy. Unfortunately no documented, signed works by Manfredi survive, and several of the forty or so works now attributed to him were formerly believed to be by Caravaggio. The steady disentangling of Caravaggio from Manfredi has made clear that it was Manfredi, rather than his master, who was primarily responsible for popularising low-life genre painting among the second generation of Caravaggisti. Manfredi was a successful artist, able to keep his own servant before he was thirty years old, "a man of distinguished appearance and fine behaviour" according to the biographer Giulio Mancini, although seldom sociable. He built his career around easel paintings for private clients, and never pursued the public commissions upon which wider reputations were built, but his works were widely collected in the 17th century and he was considered Caravaggio's equal or even superior. His Mars Chastising Cupid offers a tantalising hint at a lost Caravaggio: the master promised a painting on this theme to Mancini, but another of Caravaggio's patrons, Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte, had taken it, and Mancini therefore commissioned Manfredi to paint another for him, which Mancini considered Manfredi's best work. Manfredi died in Rome in 1622. Gerard Seghers (or Segers; 1589-1651) was one of his pupils
Johann Jakob Meyer
b Winterthur, 7 Oct 1763; d Aussersihl, Schwyz, 10 April 1830,Swiss painter and engraver. He studied under Johann Rudolf Schellenburg in Winterthur and then, in 1778, with Heinrich Rieter (1751-1818) in Berne, where he was also influenced by the topographical landscapes of Johann Ludwig Aberli. He was adept at executing such sharply detailed engravings of Swiss cities as View of Lucerne (c. 1790; e.g. Lucerne, Zentbib.), which he sold to tourists. In 1802 he published an important series of views of Switzerland, which were widely circulated. His skill as a painter of animals was sometimes combined with his rendering of the landscape, as in View of the Lake of Bienne (c. 1800; Winterthur, Kstmus.). In 1807 he taught drawing in Basle and in 1814 was active in the area around Lake Constance. His paintings are often characterized by warm colours and frequently capture the atmosphere of late afternoon, as in Murg on the Lake of Walen (c. 1820; St Gall, Kstmus.). Many of his landscapes are straightforward depictions of the Swiss countryside, stressing the romantic nature of the scene, as in View of the Area of Bex (1821; Winterthur, Kstmus.). He painted in Zurich in 1827 and was known to have travelled to Munich and Dresden. His works are important visual documents of an image of the pastoral countryside frequently propagated by Swiss artists in accordance with the philosophical ideals of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
thomas binks