Cottage Scenery

George Caleb Bingham

National Gallery of Art

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.”