Art, to Missouri Painter George Caleb Bingham, was a personal invention. According to his biographer, John Francis McDermott of Washington University in St. Louis, Bingham never had a drawing lesson in his life, never even saw a professional portrait being painted before he began turning out his own. The "first master developed beyond the Alleghenies" was an original indebted to no other artist dead or alive. Summing up his "ideal of art" in a lecture at the University of Missouri before his death in 1879, Bingham simply said that there was no greater teacher than nature, and no higher authority to...
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