WASHINGTON, May 11 (UPI) -- The National Gallery of art has acquired its first painting by George Caleb Bingham, one of the most important American masters of the 19th century.
The painting is a gift from a former deputy director who has promised his entire collection to the museum over time, it was announced by the museum recently.
The donor of the painting, "Mississippi Boatman," was identified as John Wilmerding of Princeton, N.J., a professor at Princeton University and from 1983 to 1988 a deputy director of the National Gallery after serving a number of years as a curator. The collection, one of the finest in private hands, includes works by Martin Johnson Heade, Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Eakins, and Winslow Homer.
"Mississippi Boatman" was painted in 1850. It was one of the many bucolic scenes of fronter America painted by Bingham, a Missourian, and closely related to his undisputed 1845 masterpiece, "Fur Traders Descending the Missouri," in the collection of New York's Metropolitan Museum.
Wilmerding is the great-grandson of Henry O. Havemeyer, a 19th century sugar baron, and his wife, Louisine, who were major donors of Impressionist art to the Metropolitan Museum. His grandmother, Electra Havemeher Webb, founded the Shelburne Museum of American folk art in Vermont.
