“Navigating the West: George Caleb Bingham and the River” is an exemplary feat of scholarly and curatorial acumen. Both the exhibition and accompanying catalogue bring historical and artistic breadth to a defining motif found in one artist’s oeuvre: riverboat denizens on the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. That the American painter George Caleb Bingham (1811–79) was not a great artist shouldn’t detract from the efforts of The Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth and the Saint Louis Art Museum, the show’s organizers. Nor should kudos be withheld from Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, the Met’s curator of American painting and sculpture, and the assistant research curator Stephanie L. Herdrich. They’ve installed “Navigating the West” with a steady eye for the links between Bingham’s drawings and paintings. Don’t worry: this isn’t a “specialists only” endeavor. The most heartening thing about the show is its accessibility. In terms of what it has to tell us about the quiddities of style, “Navigating the West” is, in the best sense of the phrase, user-friendly.
It doesn’t hurt that the centerpiece is Fur Traders Descending the Missouri (1845), a staple of the Met’s collection and the exhibition’s sine qua non. Bingham’s masterpiece beggars literary explication—as does any picture worth its salt. A grizzled older man, smoking a corncob pipe, sits in an impossibly slim boat; though his hands have placed an oar in the water, there is no sense of propulsion. To his right is a dark-haired boy, possibly Native American, casually