Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, George Caleb Bingham, Size: 29 X 36.5 In, Date: 1845, Museum: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
The Fur Traders Descending the Missouri shows us a painting of a French trapper and his son, canoeing down the Missouri river in a dugout canoe. The canoe is in a parallel line to the water, showing some motion in the canoe. In the background you can see maybe steam or fog, rising above the water, setting a chilly environment, showing the water is warmer than the air outside, and there are trees that are can be outlined through the fog. George places a different kind of light towards that area so it can noticeable. In the canoe are their luggage and a rifle across the sons lap. It shows both father and son looking at the viewer through the painting, the father looking more focused where the son is open, a better train of thought. A strange and unique part of the painting is the bear cub that is tied up to the end of the canoe. The bear cub is putting off a mysterious or ghostly feeling in the way they have it placed in the painting, with the reflection off the crystal clear water. George uses colors of blue and red in the trapper’s clothes, making them stick out, and a tan color to represent the air in the background, and black in the bear club, as well as the trees in the background.
George Caleb Bingham was the first major painter who lived in the west and worked on the Mississippi river. He shows us a painting of a lifestyle through trapping and how necessary trapping meant to the French trappers, who did it for a living, providing money or food for their family and to French trappers, the environment meant everything, the same as in some people’s lives in today’s world. I think he also wanted to show the bear cub and the air or fog in the background, depicting a eerie time of day, just as though the environment can be at times.
“After the middle of the eighteenth century adventurous French traders were constantly working their way through the wilderness far up the Mississippi valley into the region of the Great Lakes and along the Missouri and its tributaries. Their object was to barter various wares, supplied, for better or worse, by their own civilization, for the furs which the Indians could furnish.”
Title: An American Frontier Scene by George Caleb Bingham
Author: Harry B. Wehle
Source: The Metropolitan Bulletin of Art, Vol. 28. No. 7(1993), pp. 120-122.
