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Stump Speaking

Stump Speaking
Stump Speaking
Stump Speaking

Stump Speaking

 American, 1811 - 1879
1856
Aquatint Engraving
28 1/4 x 36 in. (71.8 x 91.4 cm)
A candidate addresses a crowd of rural voters while his opponent sits behind him taking notes. Engraved by Louis-Adolphe Gautier after Bingham's painting of 1853–54, now in the Saint Louis Art Museum.

The second of Bingham's Election Series pictures, drawn from his contested 1846 race for the Missouri legislature against Erasmus Darwin Sappington, the speaker shown.

George Caleb Bingham (1811–1879)

George Caleb Bingham was born in Augusta County, Virginia, and grew up in Franklin and Arrow Rock, Missouri. Largely self-taught, he began as a portrait painter, with brief study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1838. Between about 1845 and 1860 he painted the river and political scenes that made him the defining painter of antebellum Missouri, among them Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, The County Election and Stump Speaking. He worked in Düsseldorf from 1856 to 1859. Bingham was also active in public life, serving in the Missouri legislature, as state treasurer during the Civil War and as adjutant general, and he became the first professor of art at the University of Missouri. He died in Kansas City in 1879.
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