  About the Artwork
  
  
  Raised in central Missouri, Bingham found the most enduring subjects of his art in the trappers and boatmen who populated his state’s great rivers, the Missouri and the Mississippi. Combining the elements of water, foliage, hazy morning light, river men, and their simple crafts, he created a sequence known as “The River Paintings.”
            
The Trappers’ Return is the second version of Fur Traders Descending the Missouri (1845; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), which is generally considered the artist’s finest work in the genre idiom. Both pictures present a dugout canoe moving slowly downstream with an old French trader paddling in the stern and his son amidships with an animal chained to the bow. The arrangement of the figures and the general mood invest them with a sense of timelessness all the more striking for the specificity of the scenes depicted.
  
  
  Title
  The Trappers&#039; Return
  
  
  Artwork Date
  1851
  
  Artist
  George Caleb Bingham
  
  
  
  Life Dates
  1811-1879
  
  
  
  
  Nationality
  
  
  
  Please note:
  Definitions for nationality may vary significantly, depending on chronology and world events.
  Some definitions include:
  Belonging to a people having a common origin based on a geography and/or descent and/or tradition and/or culture and/or religion and/or language, or sharing membership in a legally defined nation.
  
  
  
  American
  
  
  
  Culture
  
  
  
  Please note:
  Cultures may be defined by the language, customs, religious beliefs, social norms, and material traits of a group.
  
  
  
  
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  Medium
  Oil on canvas
  
  
  Dimensions
  Unframed: 26 1/4 × 36 1/4 inches (66.7 × 92.1 cm)
  Framed: 31 1/4 × 41 1/16 × 2 3/4 inches (79.4 × 104.3 × 7 cm)
  
  
  Classification
  Paintings
  
  
  Department
  American Art before 1950
  
  
  Credit
  Gift of Dexter M. Ferry, Jr.
  
  
  
  Accession Number
  
  
  
  This unique number is assigned to an individual artwork as part of the cataloguing process at the time of entry into the permanent collection.
  Most frequently, accession numbers begin with the year in which the artwork entered the museum’s holdings.
  For example, 2008.3 refers to the year of acquisition and notes that it was the 3rd of that year. The DIA has a few additional systems—no longer assigned—that identify specific donors or museum patronage groups.
  
  
  
  50.138
  
  
  Copyright
  Copyright Not Evaluated
