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In August 1846, George Caleb Bingham won a seat in the Missouri House of Representatives by three votes. His opponent contested the count, and that winter the legislature took the seat away and handed it to the other man. Bingham's answer came on canvas: the Election Series of 1852 to 1855, ending with The Verdict of the People, a crowd awaiting election results.
Few American painters ever had a sharper reason to study a crowd. Bingham didn't observe election day as a tourist. He had shaken those hands, bought those rounds, and watched a clerk's tally decide his own future. When he finally painted the moment the results are read aloud, he was painting a scene that had once gone against him.
Arrow Rock, 1846: Three Votes and a Contested Count
Bingham ran as a Whig in Saline County, Missouri, where he lived in the river town of Arrow Rock. His opponent was Erasmus Darwin Sappington, a Democrat from one of the county's most powerful families. The initial count put the painter ahead by three votes. Three. Sappington challenged the result, and the dispute moved to Jefferson City, where Democrats controlled the General Assembly.
The outcome surprised nobody who understood the arithmetic of party power. The legislature examined the contested ballots, ruled in Sappington's favor, and seated him in Bingham's place. The painter had campaigned, won on the ground, and lost in committee.
He did not walk away. In 1848 Bingham stood against Sappington a second time, beat him narrowly, and served his term in the Missouri House. Later came statewide office: he was appointed Missouri State Treasurer during the Civil War. But the wound of 1846 never fully closed, and it gave his art a subject no studio training could have supplied. The men who would fill his election canvases, the talkers, the tally keepers, the hopeful and the cheated, were people he knew by name.
"An Angel Could Scarcely Pass Through": The Letter to Rollins
Bingham's confidant through the whole affair was James Sidney Rollins, a fellow Whig, lawyer, and the man later celebrated as the Father of the University of Missouri for securing the state university for Boone County. Their correspondence stretched across decades. After the 1846 contest, Bingham wrote to Rollins in disgust that an angel could scarcely pass through what he had experienced without being contaminated.
Rollins mattered to Bingham as more than a sympathetic ear. He was a patron, a promoter, and a political education in himself. Rollins went on to serve in the United States House of Representatives, where in 1865 he changed his vote and spoke on the floor in favor of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, a remarkable turn for a border-state congressman who had himself been a major slaveholder. Bingham's own late career circled back to his friend's great project: in 1877 the painter became the first professor of art at the University of Missouri, the institution Rollins had willed into existence through the General Assembly in Jefferson City.
The friendship explains something about the election paintings. They are not outsider satire. They were made by a man embedded in the machinery, with a correspondent who ran it.
1852 to 1855: The Election Series Takes Shape
Bingham's election series unfolded across three canvases. The County Election came first, completed in 1852, with a second version of 1854 now at the Reynolda House Museum of American Art. Stump Speaking followed in 1853 to 1854, showing the candidate at work before the vote. The Verdict of the People, finished in 1855, closes the cycle at the moment the results are announced. All three paintings of the trilogy belong today to the Saint Louis Art Museum.
The County Election is a whole civic world on one canvas. Children play games. Drunkards raise their glasses while party operatives haul inebriated men toward the poll. Some citizens debate the issues carefully; others study the newspaper. Art historians still argue whether Bingham is celebrating American democracy or mocking it, and that unresolved argument is precisely the painting's power. Set Stump Speaking beside The County Election and the series reads as a procedural: persuasion, then voting, then judgment.
Ask about the meaning of The Verdict of the People and the biography supplies the sharpest answer. A crowd waits on a count: on the platform at left a man reads the result aloud while a great flag drapes overhead above the gathering. Bingham had waited on one too, and the count had been taken from him. John Sartain's engraving after The County Election carried these images to a national audience, making Bingham's version of election day the one many Americans knew best.
Canvassing for a Vote: The Argument Before the Ballot
Before the series proper, Bingham painted the retail end of politics. Canvassing for a Vote, from 1851, shows a candidate working on a small knot of listeners outside a country tavern, the kind of patient, face-to-face persuasion Bingham had practiced himself in Saline County. The painting was made for the Parisian print house Goupil, which reproduced it for a wide public, and the original now belongs to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.
Canvassing for a Vote, George Caleb Bingham, 1851. View print options
There's a quiet irony in the scene. The persuader leans in; the listeners withhold judgment. Bingham knew that posture of polite resistance from both sides of the table. Political turbulence pushed other painters of his generation toward their defining subjects as well. Alfred Dehodencq carried a wound from the Paris uprising of 1848 to Spain and stayed for years to paint its religious processions. Bingham's wound was procedural rather than physical, but it shaped his art just as decisively.
The Rivers That Paid for Politics
Politics never paid Bingham's bills. The Missouri and Mississippi rivers did. In 1846, the same year as the contested election, the American Art-Union bought The Jolly Flatboatmen and distributed an engraving of it to its national membership, making Bingham famous far beyond Missouri almost overnight. The original now hangs at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
The Jolly Flatboatmen, George Caleb Bingham, 1846. View print options
That same year he painted Boatmen on the Missouri, now in the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. It's a calmer picture, working men pausing on the water, and it shows what Bingham did better than almost anyone: give ordinary labor the stillness of classical composition. He built this reputation a thousand miles from the Atlantic art capitals, much as Norway's first great landscape painter J.C. Dahl built his from a shared house in Dresden with Caspar David Friedrich. Distance from the center, in both cases, became the signature rather than the handicap.
Boatmen on the Missouri, George Caleb Bingham, 1846. View print options
The river pictures and the election pictures are one project seen from two angles. Both watch Americans gather, compete, and sort themselves out in public. The flatboat deck and the courthouse square are the same stage.
Contests Without Ballots: Shooting for the Beef and The Checker Players
Bingham kept painting contests even when no office was at stake. Shooting for the Beef, from 1850 and now at the Brooklyn Museum, records a frontier marksmanship match with a prize animal waiting for the winner. It is election day by other means: neighbors assembled, rules agreed, a result everyone must accept. The painting carries the same logic of public contest as the Election Series into a rougher, frontier setting.
Shooting for the Beef, George Caleb Bingham, 1850. View print options
The quietest contest of all is The Checker Players, also 1850, held by the Detroit Institute of Arts. Two men, one board, total concentration. If the election pictures are Bingham's public voice, this is his private one, narrowing the contest to two minds bent over a board. Readers drawn to that contemplative register will find kindred images among our dark academia art prints, where candlelit scholarship and slow games share the same mood. A painting's afterlife often outruns its moment this way; Turner's moonlit view of Alnwick Castle waited over 150 years before the castle became Hogwarts on film, and Bingham's checkerboard diplomacy feels more contemporary with every polarized news cycle.
The Checker Players, George Caleb Bingham, 1850. View print options
If the election story moved you, Canvassing for a Vote and Shooting for the Beef belong in the same room: one shows the persuasion, the other the verdict. Add Boatmen on the Missouri and you have the economy that made both possible.
George Caleb Bingham's originals are under museum glass. Yours can be on your wall this week.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What does The Verdict of the People by George Caleb Bingham depict?
It shows a crowd gathered to hear election results announced, the final act of the democratic process Bingham traced across his Election Series. Completed in 1855, it closes a cycle that began with campaigning in Stump Speaking and voting in The County Election.
Where can the original Election Series paintings be seen today?
The County Election, Stump Speaking, and The Verdict of the People belong to the Saint Louis Art Museum. A second 1854 version of The County Election is held by the Reynolda House Museum of American Art in North Carolina.
Why did Bingham paint crowds on election day?
Bingham ran for the Missouri House of Representatives as a Whig in 1846, won by three votes, and lost the seat when the legislature upheld his opponent's challenge. He won the rematch in 1848. His election paintings draw directly on that firsthand political experience.
How did George Caleb Bingham learn to paint?
Bingham was largely self-taught in frontier Missouri, beginning as a portrait painter before turning to the river and political scenes that made his name. The American Art-Union's 1846 purchase and engraving of The Jolly Flatboatmen brought him national fame.
Which side was Bingham on: celebrating democracy or criticizing it?
Art historians still debate this. His election scenes include earnest debaters and newspaper readers alongside drunkards being dragged to the polls, so the paintings can be read as both a celebration of self-government and a clear-eyed account of its flaws.
Eleanor Hart
Eleanor Hart writes about European painting for Symbol Art Gallery. She chases the small stories behind big landscapes, and still thinks one brushstroke can change a room.
