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John Sartain, after George Bingham, The County Election, 1854
The County Election
John Sartain, after George Bingham, The County Election, 1854
John Sartain, after George Bingham, The County Election, 1854
DepartmentAmerican Art

The County Election

Artist (1811 - 1879)
Date1854
Mediumhand-colored engraving with glazes
DimensionsFrame: 32 x 38 1/2 in. (81.3 x 97.8 cm) Image: 22 x 30 in. (55.9 x 76.2 cm)
Signed<see inscription>
Credit LineGift of Barbara B. Millhouse
CopyrightPublic Domain
Object number1983.2.37
DescriptionBeginning in the late 1840s, the Missouri artist George Caleb Bingham took as his subject the exercise of American democracy. In a series of paintings depicting crowds gathered to hear political speeches, politicians personally appealing for votes, and the public announcement of election results, Bingham wryly critiqued the political process as it was experienced on the local level.

By the time he embarked on this series of paintings, Bingham, a committed Whig, had gained first-hand knowledge of political dealings. His first campaign for the Missouri State Legislature in 1846 had been unsuccessful, leading him to swear off politics forever, but he could not stay away for long. He ran again, successfully, in 1848 and held numerous other political appointments and offices over the next three decades. Between 1847 and 1854, politics occupied him on the canvas as well.

In The County Election, painted 1851–1852, engraved 1854, a group of men has gathered to cast their votes by verbal declaration. Bingham masses the figures in a frieze across the canvas, creating a diagonal at right by arranging some of the citizens on the stairs leading up to a porch where they will cast their votes. The facades of the town’s buildings, opening up at left to reveal a glowing blue sky, form a well-ordered backdrop for the jam-packed scene of voters.

In the crowd, Bingham combines different telling vignettes, often metaphorical, to create an amusing narrative. In the foreground, boys play mumble-the-peg, another contest in which the outcome is still unknown. At the far left, a portly grinning man holds out his glass, to be filled with cider by a non-voting African American. The tippler’s flushed face and sprawling pose suggest that it is not his first glass. Behind him, a political operative lugs to the polling place the inert form of a man who has already consumed too much cider. This detail makes clear that the statement on the banner, “The will of the people the supreme law,” is meant ironically, since the unconscious man is incapable of exercising his will at the moment. At right, a battered figure, perhaps having come to blows over a political disagreement, hangs his head.

Bingham contrasts the evidence of vice in the scene with other moments of quiet conversation and debate. Just below the porch, a pair of humble citizens listen attentively as a third gestures to make a point. Others read the newspaper or greet friends. Bingham does not make the politician—who is simultaneously doffing his elegant hat and appealing for votes—the focal point of the painting. Instead, the viewer’s eye is drawn from one vignette to the next in order to read the narrative as a whole.

The painting, in the collection of the Saint Louis Art Museum, was well received by critics at the major Missouri newspapers, and Bingham was convinced that the subject was so appealing that the painting and subsequent engravings of the image could easily find a national audience. [1] He enlisted the help of his friend James Rollins, an influential statesman, to make the case to the American Art-Union that they should purchase the painting. Rollins wrote, “It is a National painting, for it presents just such a scene as you would meet with on the Aroostock in Maine, or in the City of New York, or on the Rio Grande in Texas, on an election day…. Bingham has left nothing out, the courtier, the politician, the labourer, the sturdy farmer, the ‘bully’ at the poles [polls], the beerseller, the bruised pugilist, and even the boys playing ‘mumble the peg’ are all distinctly recognized in the group…. But this is not the point of view in which its excellence is to be regarded. The elective franchise is the very corner stone, upon which rests our governmental superstructure and as illustrative of our fine institutions, the power and influence which the ballot box exerts over our happiness as a people, the subject of this painting was most happily chosen, and executed with wonderful skill by its gifted author.” [2]

This appeal to the Art-Union, however, was not successful; the organization, by then close to dissolution, declined to purchase the canvas. Bingham instead took the painting to the engraver John Sartain (1808–1897) in Philadelphia. An Englishman by birth, Sartain immigrated to America in 1830 and established a successful engraving practice. He engraved paintings by Benjamin West, John Neagle, and Thomas Doughty, among others. In 1848, he launched Sartain’s Magazine as a vehicle for the publication of his engravings. [3]

Bingham reported that Sartain was so enthusiastic about the prospect of engraving The County Election that he reduced his fee in order to take on the commission. [4] But Bingham had a number of special requests for the engraver, which complicated the project. Bingham directed Sartain to change the name of the newspaper in the lower right from the “Missouri Republican” to “The National Intelligencer,” a Washington paper. As Bingham wrote, “There will [thus] be nothing to mar the general character of the work, which I design to be as national as possible—applicable alike to every Section of the Union, and as illustrative of the manners of a free people and free institutions.” [5]

Art historians have debated Bingham’s attitude to the group of citizens depicted in The County Election. Some have suggested that Bingham’s affiliation with the Whig party, generally regarded as elitist, anti-populist, and anti-Jacksonian, indicates his sneering disregard for the masses assembled in the scene. Others have asserted that the benign blue sky and the well-balanced composition are meant to convey a sense of the orderly workings of democracy, even in the presence of misbehavior.

Executed during an explosive period in the nation’s history, when the debate over slavery threatened to tear the country apart, Bingham’s painting and the print based on it include one detail that reveals a clue to his sympathies: a sign in the distance that reads “Union Hotel.” Created by a Whig politician who was himself ambivalent about the issue of slavery, The County Election makes the case that the preservation of the Union trumps all other political concerns.

Notes:
[1] Elizabeth Johns, American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1991), 97.
[2] James Rollins, quoted in Johns, American Genre Painting, 97.
[3] Matthew Baigell, Dictionary of American Artists (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1979), 319–320.
[4] Michael E. Shapiro, et al., George Caleb Bingham (New York: Abrams, 1990), 33.
[5] Bingham, quoted in Johns, American Genre Painting, 98.

ProvenanceTo 1983
Barbara B. Millhouse, New York, NY and Winston-Salem, NC [1]

From 1983
Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, NC, given by Barbara B. Millhouse on December 29, 1983. [2]

Notes:
[1] Deed of Gift, object file.
[2] See note 1.

Exhibition History2010
Virtue, Vice, Wisdom & Folly: The Moralizing Tradition in American Art
Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, NC (9/18/2010-12/31/2010)

2017
Samuel F.B. Morse's Gallery of the Louvre and the Art of Invention
Reynolda House Museum of American Art (02/17/2017 - 06/04/2017)

Published ReferencesGuhin, Jeffrey. "Democracy and the Passions," The Hedgehog Review, Summer 2017, Vol. 19 no., pg 113.

Richter, Hedwig. Moderne Wahlen Ein Geschichte der Demokratie in Preuben und den USA im 19. Jahrhundert. Hamburg: Hamberger Edition, 2017. Pg. 180.

Pierce, Daniel S. , Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 2019. pg 14.
Status
Not on view
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