Recap: The Art of Politics, Yazzy's at www.walliamverdult.com

The appeal of the works of George Caleb Bingham, the celebrated "Missouri artist" of the 19th century, seems unending. The best known of his luminous river paintings -- the dreamy, somewhat mysterious "Fur Traders Descending the Missouri" and the high-spirited "Jolly Flatboatmen" -- stir the American imagination quite as much as ever, evoking an age-old American love of the open road, the same powerful theme to be found in Whitman or "Huckleberry Finn." They are called western genre scenes and acclaimed both as surpassing works of art and as part of the historical record of a brief, epochal time on the American frontier, which is exactly as Bingham himself fervently intended. And the same may be said for his renditions of democracy in action Missouri-style. As he once told a friend, Bingham was bound and determined to capture frontier life there in Missouri before it vanished. His paintings, he hoped, would guarantee that "our social and political characteristics . . . will not be lost in the lapse of time for lack of an art record rendering them full justice."

Like House Speaker Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill of our own time, Bingham considered all politics local. And in a handful of years, between 1849 and 1855, at the peak of his career, he set forth his views in such memorable scenes as "Country Politician," "Canvassing for a Vote," "Stump Speaker" and "Verdict of the People." But the jewel of the lot is "The County Election," which is the stunning subject of a special exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum through March 9, 2008. It is about as American as a painting can be, and along with its abundant charm expresses more about the realities of the political process than first meets the eye. For Bingham knew politics not just as an observer.

Bingham was a farmer's son, born in 1811 on a plantation in Augusta County, Va. He moved to Missouri as a child when his family settled first in the tiny frontier town of Franklin, beside the Missouri River, then to nearby Arrow Rock after Franklin was washed away by the river. Apprenticed as a young man to a cabinetmaker, he soon resolved, with the encouragement of the itinerant painter Chester Harding, to become an artist. Largely self-taught, he began by doing portraits. And in his struggle to make ends meet over the years, portraits were to be a mainstay.

Missouri remained his home throughout his life, except for a few sojourns in the East and one visit to Europe, these in the hope of benefiting his career. (There was no "honorable sacrifice" he would not make to attain eminence in his calling, Bingham once said by way of explanation for such absences.) Moving from place to place across the state, he set up studios in Arrow Rock, Boonville, Columbia, Jefferson City, St. Louis, Independence, and finally Kansas City, where he died in 1879.

A handsome, opinionated man with dark brown eyes and a generally cheerful expression, he was small in stature, "delicate" looking, and wore a reddish brown wig, having lost all his hair at age 19 from a severe attack of measles.

Much of his life was marked by tragedy and disappointment. He suffered the deaths of a son and of two wives. A first foray into public life, when he was 35, left him bitterly resolved to have nothing to do with politics ever again.

He had stood for the state legislature, running as a Whig, in 1846, and won by a narrow margin, only to have his victory overturned. It was enough, Bingham wrote, to make him want "to strip off my clothes and bury them, scour my body all over with sand and water, put on a clean suit, and keep out of the mire of politics."

As it happened, 1846 was also the year "The Jolly Flatboatmen" became a "best-seller," when chosen by the American Art Union in St. Louis for its annual engraving. More than 10,000 prints were sold. Bingham attained renown of the kind he had dreamed of, and Missouri could claim its first home-grown notable, years in advance of Mark Twain and Harry Truman.

Still, the pull of politics was irresistible. Two years later Bingham ran again for the legislature. This time he won by a clear margin and served a single term. And though he kept working steadily at his painting all the while, he could never get politics entirely out of his system, pondering often as years passed whether to run for Congress perhaps or for governor.

Much that Bingham loved about the democratic process as practiced by the "frontier type" is celebrated in "The County Election." The feeling is one of tremendous vitality and a clear unabashed sense of theater, with the whole arrangement lit, like so many of Bingham's scenes, from the lower left. It is the light of early morning, that luscious variety that makes everything glow -- and, in this case, a gathering of local citizens all arranged quite as though on stage. It is as if a director has only minutes before called, "Places everyone!" and veteran character actors have taken up their poses for the opening curtain.

If paintings may be said to have sound, Bingham's often vibrate. In "The Jolly Flatboatmen," a dancer pounds the deck of a Missouri flatboat to a fiddler's tune and the beat of a tin pan. Here it is the high-spirited hubbub of a festival of townsmen and plain farmers chattering, conversing, calling out greetings above the racket.

The setting is out of doors, in the open air no less than the sunshine of a new day, this again as in so many of the river paintings. No back-room politics after dark here, but the people's rightful day to vote their choices, and thus also (and again as in the river paintings) to be free of work, free to enjoy themselves. A blue sign says, "The will of the people as the supreme law." A stray dog goes about its business. Two boys (who might be Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn) play mumblety-peg with pocketknives. And there are no women. It is conspicuously an all-male affair -- and, yes, white men only, except for a single African-American servant (possibly a slave) who tends a cider barrel on the left.

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