Cottage Scenery

1845

George Caleb Bingham

Painter, American, 1811 - 1879

Three people gather around the doorway of a small cottage set in a sun-warmed yard in this almost square painting. At the center of the composition, the tan cottage has a faded, peach-tinged thatched roof and a window with an open shutter to the right of the door. The top half of the Dutch door is swung open, and a woman wearing a white cap and blue, low-cut garment leans her forearms along the bottom half from inside the structure. Two men flank the door. One stands to our left, looking at the woman in profile. He wears a straw-colored hat, white shirt, ruby-red vest, and dark pants. To our right, a seated man wears a brown hat, a sage-green coat, and slate-blue pants. A rickety fence to our left separates us from a grove of trees, the massive green canopies almost filling the top left quadrant of the painting. Another picket fence comes toward us from the right side of the cottage. It opens onto the dirt patch that nearly spans the lower edge of the canvas. To our right, the kinked branches of a mostly dead tree with only a few sparse leaves looms above the horizon, which comes about a quarter of the way up the composition. Beyond it, a flat, grassy field stretches back to the edge of a body of water where two cows and possibly other animals stand and lie in the distance. Bands of trees become hazier in the distance. A few birds perch atop the cottage roof and more wheel above, painted as tiny strokes against milky-white clouds that give way to a pale blue sky. The artist signed the lower left corner, “G. C. Bingham.”

Media Options

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Cottage Scenery is one of four paintings by George Caleb Bingham accepted for display at the 1845 exhibition of the American Art-Union, a pioneering organization in the promotion of contemporary American art. Bingham’s first submissions to the Art-Union, these works also were among his earliest forays into the western subject matter that would preoccupy him for more than a decade; the group also included the iconic river picture Fur Traders Descending the Missouri (1845, Metropolitan Museum of Art). The bucolic scene of farmers before their cottage—sheltered by leafy trees and overlooking pasturing cows, a lake or river, and distant hills—resembles the rustic settlements the artist knew as a youth in rural Missouri. In composing the work, Bingham seems to have taken to heart a statement in the Art-Union’s 1844 annual report. Encouraging American artists to create landscape paintings in order to satisfy the organization’s largely urban membership, the document stated that “those who cannot afford a seat in the country . . . may at least have a country seat in the parlors; a bit of landscape with a green tree, a distant hill, or low-roofed cottage.”

A largely self-taught painter who began his career as a portraitist, Bingham here blends landscape and genre, and as such hints at a transition occurring in his career. The trio of figures in conversation enlivening the picturesque view suggests his growing interest in genre scenes, developed as a result of his contemporary William Sidney Mount’s success in that arena.

Like his masterpieces The Jolly Flatboatmen and Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, Cottage Scenery was purchased by the Art-Union directly from Bingham. Through a lottery, the progressive organization guaranteed its members a chance to win one of the original paintings featured in its annual exhibition. It also popularized those paintings by distributing thousands of prints of them to its members across the country. John D. Carhart of Macon, Georgia, was the recipient of this canvas, which remained in his family for more than 100 years.

On View

West Building Main Floor, Gallery 65

Artwork overview

Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Purchased 1845 from the artist by the American Art Union, New York; won 1845 by James D. Carhart, Macon, Georgia; by descent through the Carhart family; (Berry–Hill Galleries, New York); purchased 1960 by Lawrence A. Fleischman, Detroit; (Kennedy Galleries, New York); purchased 1961 by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington; acquired 2014 by the National Gallery of Art.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1845

  • American Art Union, New York, 1845, no. 98.

1961

  • Romantic America, John Herron Art Institute, Indianapolis,1961, no. 4.

1967

  • George Caleb Bingham, 1811-1879, National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington; Cleveland Museum of Art; Art Galleries, University of California, Los Angeles, 1967-1968, no. 12.

1976

  • Corcoran [The American Genuis], Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 1976, unnumbered catalogue.

1990

  • George Caleb Bingham, Saint Louis Art Museum, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1990, no. 2.

1993

  • The Century Club Collection, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 1993, unpublished checklist.

2008

  • The American Evolution: A History through Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 2008, unpublished checklist.

2013

  • American Journeys: Visions of Place, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 21 September 2013-28 September 2014, unpublished checklist.

Bibliography

2011

  • Shapiro, Emily Dana. "George Caleb Bingham, Cottage Scenery." In Corcoran Gallery of Art: American Paintings to 1945. Edited by Sarah Cash. Washington, 2011: 88-89, 260, repro.

Inscriptions

lower left: G. C. Bingham

Wikidata ID

Q20187340

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