Western Raftsmen

Object Details

Object Essay

Western Raftsmen was an atypical subject for James H. Beard, so it is interesting to note that his near-contemporary George Caleb Bingham (1811–1879) had begun his great series of paintings of the Missouri and the Mississippi just one year earlier (see Acc. Nos. 82.5 and 82.6). Whether or not the two men knew each other, it is likely that Beard became acquainted with Bingham’s paintings during Beard’s residence in New York between 1846–1847. Bingham had sent four paintings to the exhibition of the American Art-Union in 1845 and two in 1846: three of the six were river scenes, in which genre mixed with landscape. Beard’s Western Raftsmen may be the painting he exhibited at the Art-Union in 1846 under the title Landscape—Western Scene. In any event, it bears more than a passing resemblance to Bingham’s river paintings (although the latter’s figures are invariably larger than Beard’s tiny actors).^{1_{Cowdrey, 2: 18–19, 2: 21–22. Beard’s Landscape—Western Scene was no. 66 and was distributed by lottery to J. W. Stout, New Brunswick, New Jersey. Bingham’s submissions in 1845 included the now-famous Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, no. 93; The Concealed Enemy, no. 95; and in 1846 Boatmen on the Missouri, no. 14.}}

Born in Buffalo, New York, Beard moved with his family to Painesville, Ohio, in 1823, where his brother William Holbrook Beard was born the following year. At the age of fifteen, he received some instruction from an itinerant painter, Jarvis Hanks, and about 1828 went in search of portrait commissions himself, asking five dollars a head, and moving, town by town, to New Orleans. He returned to Cincinnati about 1834 and, except for the aforementioned stay in New York and his Civil War service, he remained there until 1870, when he moved to New York for the rest of his life.^{2_{Groce and Wallace, 38; Donald Ralph Mackenzie, “Painters in Ohio, 1788–1860,” Ph.D. diss. (Ohio State University, 1960), 169.}}

Far from being a landscape specialist, Beard turned from painting portraits to genre subjects, and then animal painting. His genre pictures on occasion have genuine emotional resonance (for example, The North Carolina Emigrants, location unknown, 1845–1846). Although he had an early success with portraits of children with pet animals, he abandoned the children and painted animals with the sentimental anthropomorphism of the Victorian age. Going a step further, he painted fantasies in which animals endowed with human characteristics comically dramatize human foibles. Beard’s younger brother, William, pursued this genre with such critical and financial success that James was probably encouraged to concentrate more upon it himself. The renowned Cincinnati art patron Nicholas Longworth “considered [James] Beard exceptionally talented but lazy and given to fine living.”^{3_{Ibid., 169.}}

The idyllic tone of Western Raftsmen echoes Beard’s attitude toward the subject, but it does not represent the reality of river life in 1846. The flatboat had been described in 1838 as a “relic of those ancient and primitive species of river-craft which once assumed ascendancy over the waters of the West, but which are now superseded by steam.”^{4_{Flagg, 1:30; Hassrick et al., 28.}} The nostalgia of the scene is underscored by the dilapidated, abandoned log cabin and the tree whose roots have been undercut by erosion. Beard’s painting is a lyrical, even poignant interpretation of the frontier.

William Kloss

Excerpted from Clement E. Conger, et al. Treasures of State: Fine and Decorative Arts in the Diplomatic Reception Rooms of the U.S. Department of State. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1991.