Mississippi Boatman

George Caleb Bingham

National Gallery of Art

A bearded man with wrinkled, peachy skin and reddened cheeks sits and smokes a pipe on a wooden box in a landscape in this vertical painting. The man’s body faces us, and he peers at us with dark eyes under heavy, bushy white brows. Wrinkles line his forehead, the corners of his eyes, and his cheeks. He has a bulbous nose and a gray beard, and the long-stem pipe is pinched in his downturned mouth. His shaggy gray hair is covered by a cardinal-red cap. He wears a blousy daffodil-yellow shirt, which is loose around the neck, faded and patched blue pants, and scuffed brown boots. His legs are crossed with one knee over the other, and one fist rests in his lap. The other elbow is propped on a pyramid of three wooden barrels stacked on their sides to our left. A few bits of bricks or red stones are near the man’s feet, and a wooden houseboat with a low-pitched roof is in the near distance, to our right. The platform under the structure floats on a river, which is lined with trees to our right and mountains to our left. The sunset warms the face of the mountains and the trees to red and gold. Sage-green and peach clouds billow above the man, dividing the sky diagonally in front of bright blue sky beyond. The artist signed and dated the painting in the lower left corner, “G.C. Bingham 1850.”