Raftsmen Playing Cards

On a flatboat drifting the Missouri, rivermen pause from their work to gather around a game of cards, their poses arranged in a calm, almost classical balance against the wide, hazy river. George Caleb Bingham, the painter of frontier life, gives these rough boatmen a quiet monumentality, the everyday made stately. Now in St. Louis, Raftsmen Playing Cards captures the rhythms of life on the great American rivers - labor, leisure, and the slow current - composed with a stillness and order that lift the ordinary scene toward the dignity of history painting.