?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 5,000 - $ 8,000
THOMAS HART BENTON Barges on the Missouri.
Brush and brown wash and pen and ink with pencil on wove paper, circa 1940. 9 1/8x11 7/8 inches. Signed in pencil, lower right recto.
Along with Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) was considered America's foremost Regionalist painter of the 1930s and 1940s. He celebrated the bounty of the earth and heroicized the efforts of ordinary workers and citizens who went about their daily tasks. The rhythmic curving lines that characterize Benton's compositions suggest the vitality of nature and immediacy of his subject. Much of his subjects through World War II focus on middle America, where he took residency, predominantly in his native Missouri, and throughout the Midwest and the South, where he was commissioned to paint numerous murals. The present lot recalls Benton's early service in the Navy during World War I, when he was stationed at Norfolk, Virginia, and directed to make drawings and illustrations of shipyard life.
