PIKES PEAK PAINTED BY GEORGE CALEB BINGHAM

GEORGE-CALEB BINGHAM (1811-1879) 

Pikes Peak (4, 302 m - 14, 115 ft) 

United States of America (Colorado) 

 In View of Pike's Peak, 1872, oil on canvas, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth

The mountain 

Pikes Peak (4, 302 m - 14, 115 ft) is the highest summit of the southern Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, in North America. The peak is is located in Pike National Forest, 12.0 miles (19.3 km) west by south (bearing 263°) of downtown Colorado Springs, Colorado. The mountain is named in honor of American explorer Zebulon Pike, who was unable to reach the summit. The summit is higher than any point in the United States east of its longitude.

Pikes Peak is a designated National Historic Landmark.

"Tava" or “sun” is the Ute word that was given by these first people to the mountain that we now call Pikes Peak. The band of Ute people who called the Pikes Peak region their home were the "Tabeguache" meaning the "People of Sun Mountain." The Ute people first arrived in Colorado about 500 A.D., although their traditions state they were created on Pikes Peak. In the 1800s, when the Arapaho people arrived in Colorado, they knew the mountain as "Heey-otoyoo’ " meaning "Long Mountain".  Early Spanish explorers named the mountain "El Capitán" meaning "The Leader". American explorer Zebulon Pike named the mountain "Highest Peak" in 1806, and the mountain was later commonly known as "Pike's Highest Peak". American explorer Stephen Harriman Long named the mountain "James Peak" in honor of Edwin James who climbed to the summit in 1820. The mountain was later renamed "Pike's Peak" in honor of Pike. The name was simplified to "Pikes Peak" by the United States Board on Geographic Names in 1890.

The artist

George Caleb Bingham was an American artist whose paintings of American life in the frontier lands along the Missouri River exemplify the Luminist style. Left to languish in obscurity, Bingham's work was rediscovered in the 1930s. By the time of his bicentennial in 2011, he was considered one of the greatest American painters of the 19th century. That year the George Caleb Bingham Catalogue Raisonné Supplement Of Paintings & Drawings—directed and edited by Bingham scholar Fred R. Kline—announced the authentication of ten recently discovered paintings by Bingham. As of June 2015, a total of twenty-three  newly discovered paintings by Bingham have been authenticated and are listed with the GCBCRS. George Caleb Bingham is not famous for his mountain paintings  but mainly for a series of three paintings called The Election Series Louis and for his Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, painted circa 1845  and owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.