George Caleb Bingham was one of the leading American genre painters of the mid-nineteenth century. Yet his fame rests on fewer than twenty pictures that describe aspects of life on what was then the nation's frontier, the Mississippi River valley and his home state of Missouri. His best known paintings fall into two topic categories: activity on the river, including such works as Fur Traders Descending the Missouri (1845), The Jolly Flatboatmen (1846), Raftmen Playing Cards (1847), and frontier politics, including Canvassing for a Vote (1852), County Election (1852), Stump Speaking (1854) and Verdict of the People (1855).

Surprisingly, what is not as well recollected is that Bingham was a prolific portraitist; it was in fact his chief livelihood. Biographers estimate he painted at least a thousand portraits over a forty-five year span. The Hunter's companion portraits of John R. and Elizabeth Carpenter Griffin are believed to have been done about 1860, when the artist is known to have temporarily resided in Independence, Missouri, where Mr. Griffin was the manager of the Barlow-Sanderson Stagecoach Line. Bingham's portrait style changed little over his lifetime and it lacked the expressive vigor and social consciousness of his genre pieces. As the Griffin pair fairly demonstrate, his portraits typically were painted by formula, using standard, rather wooden three-quarter-length poses as well as other such stock devices as heavy corner draperies, classical columns, and distant landscape vistas seen through a window or portal. More typical of a primitive or self-taught artist, the rendering is uneven. Though stiff and linear, the faces are carefully detailed, in marked contrast to the hands, which are only summarily recorded.

Bingham was born on a farm near Charlottesville, Virginia. When he was eight the family moved to the frontier town of Franklin, Missouri, where he grew up. He was apprenticed to a cabinetmaker and is also thought to have studied briefly with an unidentified itinerant portrait painter about 1832 (not the artist Chester Harding as some early biographies have held). In 1838 he studied three months at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He returned to Missouri, but in the fall of 1840 he moved to Washington, D.C., established a studio in a basement room at the U.S. Capitol, and set up to paint portraits of public figures. All the while he was in the East, Bingham had ample opportunity to see works by the better American painters as well as engravings and copies of Renaissance and Baroque masters. He had an astonishing ability to absorb lessons on drawing and composition through such perusal.

By late 1844 Bingham was again in Missouri. In the decade that followed he produced the best and most famous of his genre paintings as well as many portraits. It was during this period too that he became personally involved in politics. He ran for office several times, and was elected to the state legislature in 1848.

From 1856 to 1859 Bingham was in Germany to attend the renowned Düsseldorf Academy. Many critics feel that this experience was ultimately detrimental in that he seemed to lose his native American vision and strong genre style in favor of an affected or overly refined manner. In any case, during and after the Civil War his renewed interest in politics and public service diminished his productivity as a painter. In 1862 he was appointed state treasurer for a two-year term. In 1875, he was named state adjutant general. Perhaps one of the most important elections in which Bingham was called upon came near the end of his life and was not political. In October 1877 he was invited to the faculty at the University of Missouri in Columbia as professor of art. It was largely an honorary position and though he was provided a studio at the campus, he was allowed to divide his time among Columbia, Jefferson City, and Kansas City. He died in Kansas City in 1879 at age sixty-eight.