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Thomas Hart Benton, 1889-1975
In the early years of his career, Thomas Hart Benton was among the young painters drawn to extraction. He soon rejected that brand of modernism, however, and emerged in the 1920s as a leader of the regionalist shcool of realism, whose primary concern was the portrayal of local life and history in American. Best known for his panoramic murals, Benton brought to his works a boldness of composition that led one critic to describe him as "the most... vigorous and virile of our painters." Benton made this portrait of himself and his wife, "Self-Portrait with Rita," at Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts during the first year of their marraige, in the course of the residence there, he later recalled, "I really began tp mature my painting," and the monumentality of its muscular figures anticipated his later work.
Self-portrait, 1922 |