SANTA FE, NM.- The George Caleb Bingham Catalogue Raisonné Supplement Of Paintings & Drawings has announced the addition of ten recently discovered paintings by Missouri’s first artist George Caleb Bingham (1811-1879), an “old master” of American art whose Bicentennial is being celebrated in 2011. The paintings –exhibited, catalogued, and illustrated online at www.GeorgeCalebBingham.org – include: “Horse Thief” (a narrative landscape), and portraits of Lewis Allen Dicken Crenshaw, Fanny Smith Crenshaw, Frederick Moss Prewitt, Civil War Lt. Col. Levi Pritchard, Charles Chilton, Samuel Chilton, Thomas B. Hudson, Missouri Steamboat Capt. Joseph Kinney, and a currently unidentified woman.

The new Catalogue Raisonne began in 2005 as a scholarly enterprise directed and edited by art historian and Bingham specialist Fred R. Kline with an advisory board consisting of renowned Bingham biographer and Missourian Dr. Paul Nagel and noted Washington, DC art historian, lecturer, and author William Kloss. The Bingham Catalogue is a project of Kline Art Research Associates of Santa Fe, NM. The new catalogue continues and adds to the established work of E. Maurice Bloch’s two Bingham Catalogues Raisonnés, standard works begun in the 1940s which include all Bingham’s known drawings and paintings up to 1986; Bloch died in 1989. Both catalogues published by University of Missouri Press are out of print. New works continue to be published online and will in the future be published as a separate book or as a supplement in a reprinting of the Bloch catalogues.

According to Kline: “The vast majority of Bingham’s over 500 recorded paintings are not signed, including famous ones like “Fur Traders Descending the Missouri”, “The Emigration of Daniel Boone” and “The County Election”, and only a handful of portraits of the 460 known are signed. Unfortunately, Bingham neglected record keeping, allowing scores of paintings to remain unidentified, probably more than any other American master. Eight out of the ten paintings we discovered were unknown to Professor Bloch, the other two were unsolved mysteries, all were unsigned, and now only one portrait lacks identification of the sitter. Bingham’s complete body of work is a slow voyage of discovery but there’s no doubt scores of additional paintings are out there.” Kline’s discoveries of “lost art” over thirty years include an array of rare works acquired by major museums and private collections. His memoir, “Art Explorer: A Search for Lost Art in America”, will be published in 2011.