George Caleb Bingham

Two men drift down the Missouri River in a dugout canoe at first light, a dark animal chained at the prow, the water so still it doubles them. George Caleb Bingham painted this around 1845, and it is now one of the most familiar images of the early American frontier. He first called it 'French Trader and Half-Breed Son'. The art society that distributed it changed the title to the tamer 'Fur Traders Descending the Missouri' and left the creature at the bow unexplained, still argued over as a bear cub, a fox or a cat.

Bingham knew this world at first hand. Raised in frontier Missouri and largely self-taught, he built his reputation on river men, boatmen and traders, and on a famous run of election scenes, where candidates work the crowd and voters line up in the dust of a country town.

He lived the politics too. Bingham won a seat in the Missouri legislature and later served as the state's treasurer, painting between offices. His work then dropped out of fashion for decades, until the Metropolitan Museum in New York bought the fur traders' canoe in 1933 and set his reputation going again.