Gallery Talk: “I Forget I Am a Painter, not a Politician”

Charles E. Valier, chairman of the Bingham Trust, will lead a gallery talk about Missourian George Caleb Bingham. The free program begins in Sculpture Hall and is limited to 30 visitors on a first-come, first-served basis.

Bingham became a fervent Whig supporter after the collapse of the banking system in 1837 deprived him of his recent earnings. His genre paintings, river scenes, and crowded election depictions are peppered with political innuendo. The talk will explore Bingham’s election series paintings, part of the Museum’s collection, and show how politics and painting intertwined in those oeuvres.

In 1974, the St. Louis Mercantile Library proposed selling a trove of more than 100 of Bingham’s preparatory drawings to fund air conditioning for the building. To keep these valuable drawings in Missouri, then-Gov. Christopher “Kit” Bond launched a statewide campaign to raise funds to buy the drawings and place them in a trust to be owned by the citizens of Missouri. Today, the drawings of the Bingham Trust reside at the Saint Louis Art Museum and Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.