American Historical Epic - Exploration and Discovery: Aggression - Study

The present work is a study for a painting of the same title, which dates from 1919 to 1924 and is the central panel of the first chapter of Thomas Hart Benton's ambitious history series, The American Historical Epic, currently in the collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. According to Henry Adams, Benton "conceived this series while he was in the Navy, when he came upon a volume of Spencer's History of the United States that belonged to his landlady. The original seeds of the idea go back even further, to when he was a boy of seventeen at Western Military Academy and wrote to his mother of his ambition to create a series depicting 'The Explorers and Adventurers of Early America.' He now planned a series of seventy-five paintings (he completed only about eighteen). His first 'chapter' of five paintings showed the arrival of the settlers and their conflicts with the Indians. The second chapter showed the conquest of the mountainous interior regions of the United States, and included a battle scene from the French and Indian War. A third, incomplete chapter portrayed the economic life of the early colonies...Benton later recalled that he wished 'to present a people's history in contrast to the conventional histories which generally spotlighted great men, political and military events, and successions of ideas. I wanted to show that the people's behaviors, their action on the opening land, was the primary reality of American life.'" (Thomas Hart Benton: An American Original, New York, 1989, pp. 128-29)

This work will be included in the forthcoming Thomas Hart Benton catalogue raisonné being prepared by the Thomas Hart Benton Catalogue Raisonné Foundation. Committee Members: Dr. Henry Adams, Jessie Benton, Anthony Benton Gude, Andrew Thompson and Michael Owen.