Texas Panhandle, Route #66

Dr. Henry Adams, a committee member for the Thomas Hart Benton Catalogue Raisonné Foundation, writes in an unpublished letter that the present work's "lively brushwork and unusual use of color is very characteristic of Benton's hand, and he does a wonderful job of giving life and animation to a scene that might easily have been boring in the hand of another painter...My best guess is that this painting dates from about 1953--the date of a similar composition, titled Kansas Wheat Scene, which was a bequest to the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas from Franklin Murphy, a former chancellor of the University of Kansas. This has a similar vista of highway and telephone poles on the left, but also includes a tractor and wheat-field on the right. The design is close enough to make me suspect that the two works are very close in date."

Adams continues that, while similar to this Kansas scene in Benton's oeuvre, the present work is also "nearly identical in composition to a drawing attributed to Benton, titled Route #66...The title makes sense since if you follow Route #66, it leads through a short section of Missouri and Kansas to Oklahoma and then on to the Texas Panhandle. Of course it's a bit confusing that this painting has been described as Texas but that the very similar landscape in the Spencer Museum has been described as Kansas, but Benton quite often combined motifs from different places in one design. Most likely this painting does indeed portray Texas, but it became 'Kansas' in the second painting, when Benton combined it with a Kansas sketch." (unpublished letter, 2015)