A George Caleb Bingham painting made headlines after the 2016 presidential election; unfortunately, it was for all the wrong reasons.

 As is tradition, an American painting serves as the backdrop for each president’s inaugural luncheon. Apparently, Senator Roy Blunt, a Republican from Missouri, initiated the loan of George Caleb Bingham’s The Verdict of the People in July 2016, four months before anyone knew what we were in for. Based on the next four years, perhaps a more fitting painting would have been Francisco Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son.

Now, it’s not that Bingham’s painting itself is bad, but it is steeped in a complicated and problematic history. The painting essentially represents the stilted and imperfect version of democracy that reigned in the antebellum South, where those in power infused their politics with racism and promoted the subjugation of enslaved Black people that made their plantations possible (and very lucrative) for their white owners. Part of a three-part series depicting the American electoral process, this scene shows the announcement of election results and the myriad reactions that inevitably follow. Although Bingham sought to portray a diverse voting population, they all look like white men to me. He goes so far as to try to include some of those who were barred from the voting process – Black people and white women – but they are relegated to the shadows and background, respectively.

The moral question of slavery embroiled the citizens of 1855 Missouri, setting the scene for why this painting stokes so much opposition. Bingham was an anti-slavery Whig who fought against the expansion of slavery into the territories. Members of the Democratic party, on the other hand, either supported slavery or remained complicit in their silence. To settle the score, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, just one year before Bingham created this painting. This act allowed the issue of slavery to be chosen by a popular vote – the very kind of vote to which Verdict of the People alludes. As it happened, pro-slavery Missourians, determined to allow Kansas to become a slave state, crossed the border to attack abolitionist settlers and sway the vote. Would the democratic process of the time be fair and allow for the right decision to be made? According to this work, Bingham didn’t seem to think so.

The validity of the popular vote remains a contemporary issue. When Donald Trump’s campaign and ultimate election brought so much strife to the nation, many couldn’t believe that his rise to office was truly a verdict of the people. Citing that Trump lost the popular vote by three million votes, an artist and art historian teamed up to defend that his election was not backed by the people of the United States. They also claimed that the loan by the Saint Louis Art Museum constituted an endorsement of the new president. Claiming to remain non-partisan, the museum did not balk.

Unsurprisingly, Trump broke from the tradition of displaying an artwork of either a previous president or an American landscape at his luncheon. Rembrandt Peale’s portrait of George Washington hung at George H.W. Bush’s 1989 luncheon. Thomas Sully’s portrait of Thomas Jefferson was displayed at both of Bill Clinton’s inaugural luncheons in 1993 and 1997. Keeping with the landscape tradition, George W. Bush’s 2005 luncheon featured Wind River, Wyoming by Albert Bierstadt.