George Caleb Bingham (1811-1879) is renowned today as one of the classic artists of the American West. His paintings rank among the nation’s greatest art treasures. Bingham can lay claim to being the first outstanding American artist from the “West“. He is best known for his genre scenes derived from the daily life of what was then the Western frontier. Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery had returned from their 1804-06 westward exploration only five years before Bingham was born. In 1820, when Bingham was nine, Missouri became the 24 th state. Bingham’s paintings from 1845-55 the decade of his best work generally relate to life and commerce along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, and to the American scene involving the people of Missouri in and around St. Louis, Columbia, Jefferson City, Arrow Rock, Boonville, and Kansas City. His genre paintings -narratives of everyday life- depicted and immortalized the common man: fur traders and riverboatmen and settlers in scenes of frontier life (which he knew from both tradition and first hand observation); and scenes of the young nation’s democratic process: political campaigning and elections (which he knew from his deep involvement with the Whig party, with Missouri state politics and national politics, and as a seeker and achiever of political office).

In 1856, Bingham with his wife and daughter Clara sailed for Europe, first to Paris, which he found alien and inhospitable and expensive and even the Louvre disconcerting. George and his family then went on to a sojourn in Dusseldorf, where he completed full-length portraits of Washington and Jefferson (a commission from the Missouri State Legislature, both now destroyed by fire); the second of three related flatboatmen paintings, “Jolly Flatboatmen in Port“ (1857); “Moonlight Scene: Castle on the Rhine“(1857, Private Collection); and probably other unrecorded works. Düsseldorf , compared to Paris, was a manageable city of 30,000 and a famous art center that had attracted, interestingly enough, such aspiring German-American artists as Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, Carl Wimar, and Albert Bierstadt all of whom had been born in Germany and emigrated to the United States as children, only to return to Germany to study and in Leutze’s case to live in Düsseldorf for many years where he also became a noted teacher. From the 1840s through the 1850s other American artists such as T. Worthington Woodridge, Richard Caton Woodville, and Eastman Johnson also studied in Düsseldorf. Leutze, as teacher and great friend of visiting American artists, was a first stop for American expatriates, and Bingham, although a mature and established painter, was no exception. George wrote to his friend Rollins back in Columbia, Missouri: “Immediately upon our arrival in Dusseldorf, I called upon Leutze, the famous painter, who received me as cordially as if I had been a brother, and without a moment’s delay assisted me in finding a Studio, and introduced me to one of his American pupils through whose guidance I shortly obtained accommodations of the best kind, and upon the most reasonable terms.“
 
Bron: en.wikipedia.org