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Lot Essay
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.
The present work is a study for Thomas Hart Benton's first New England genre painting, People of Chilmark (1922, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.). Also considered his first Regionalist portrait, here Benton rejects the abstract art so popular in the 1920s to instead focus on the American environment, specifically the idyllic natural beauty of Martha’s Vineyard, where the artist and his wife summered in the isolated fishing and farming area of Chilmark each year. A combination of bold, sculpturesque forms and spatial illusion, this study was modeled by Benton's wife, Rita; brother-in-law, Louis; neighbor, Peggy Owen; and friend, Thomas Craven, in a Rubensian scene of frenetic energy. The swirling assemblage of figures rotating around the centrally placed beach ball is a continuation of his Renaissance studies, and the flowing serpentine patterns are reminiscent of Japanese wood block prints, for which he acquired a taste years before. Dr Henry Adams writes that the present work "clearly represents an early compositional study that Benton made from his painted clay model...your painting represents the core design, or essential design, from which the later painting sprang. This is surely one of the first instances in which we can follow Benton's development of a composition step by step, showing the methods which he later followed with only minor variations for the rest of his career." (unpublished letter, dated 2004)
The present work is a study for Thomas Hart Benton's first New England genre painting, People of Chilmark (1922, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.). Also considered his first Regionalist portrait, here Benton rejects the abstract art so popular in the 1920s to instead focus on the American environment, specifically the idyllic natural beauty of Martha’s Vineyard, where the artist and his wife summered in the isolated fishing and farming area of Chilmark each year. A combination of bold, sculpturesque forms and spatial illusion, this study was modeled by Benton's wife, Rita; brother-in-law, Louis; neighbor, Peggy Owen; and friend, Thomas Craven, in a Rubensian scene of frenetic energy. The swirling assemblage of figures rotating around the centrally placed beach ball is a continuation of his Renaissance studies, and the flowing serpentine patterns are reminiscent of Japanese wood block prints, for which he acquired a taste years before. Dr Henry Adams writes that the present work "clearly represents an early compositional study that Benton made from his painted clay model...your painting represents the core design, or essential design, from which the later painting sprang. This is surely one of the first instances in which we can follow Benton's development of a composition step by step, showing the methods which he later followed with only minor variations for the rest of his career." (unpublished letter, dated 2004)