To celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Boone County National Bank, a painting of the bank’s cofounder, Robert Beverly Price, is on display in the State Historical Society of Missouri’s Main Gallery. The painting is on loan from the founder’s descendant, Albert M. Price.
R. B. Price was born in Virginia in 1832 before moving with his family to Brunswick, Missouri, in 1837. Price would move again, but this time to Columbia in 1850, where he attended the University of Missouri. Six years later he would marry Emma Prewitt, and in 1857, with the help of her father, Frederick Moss Prewitt, and another Prewitt son-in-law, John Parker, he opened Boone County National Bank. Bev, as Price was nicknamed, was president of the bank from 1869 to 1924.
Price’s portrait, painted by George Caleb Bingham in the early 1860s, depicts Price shortly after the bank opened, attired in formal clothing.
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