Fur Traders Descending the Missouri

Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, luminist oil painting created in 1845 by American frontier artist George Caleb Bingham. Bingham was known for paintings that immortalize the vanished world of the North American frontier, and this is one of his best-known works. His solemn reverence for the landscape is characteristic of many mid-19th-century realists, yet he represents its beauty with a unique sensitivity to colour and light.

After completing only a few months of formal training at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and later personal study of several works by British artists, Bingham returned to Missouri, where he had grown up, to settle. There he dedicated himself to producing landscape scenes and representing the fishermen and trappers who had recently occupied the area. This painting—showing two trappers in the early morning, eyeing the viewer from their canoe, in which lie a dead duck atop a pile of furs and a tethered cat or bear cub—particularly appealed to urban viewers. Bingham elegantly employs deft brushwork, a striking, geometric composition, and clear, pure use of light to illuminate the hard-scrabble life of settlers and river men involved in the risky adventure of occupying a new land.

Bingham originally titled this painting French-Trader—Half Breed Son, but the American Art Union, which acquired the painting, chose to give it a less controversial title before exhibiting it in New York. Fur Traders Descending the Missouri later fell into obscurity until its 1933 purchase by New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.