The Jolly Flatboatmen

American river music in 1846: one man plays a fiddle, a younger one bangs on a pan for percussion, and a crewman in a pink shirt dances on the flatboat with his arms thrown up and his hair blowing. It is a two-man band with no stage but the cargo deck, and the whole crew is caught up in the tune. The painting reached far more people than ever saw it. Members of the American Art-Union received prints of it, some 18,000 were circulated, and the canvas itself went to a lottery winner. It now hangs at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.