Thomas Hart Benton

Hopmeyer & Jennings Toronto, 4 December 1994, lot 254

Acquired from the above by the present owner

In the late 1920s, Thomas Hart Benton traveled across the United States to source material as he completed his murals of The American Historical Epic, a project begun earlier in the decade. Benton’s studies and observations also contributed to his mural projects of the 1930s, including America Today and The Arts of Life in America, and encouraged a return to easel paintings that individually pictured scenes of American life. Paintings of cotton pickers, whom Benton had observed and sketched in Georgia, inspired a substantial body of work from which examples are held today by important institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, Yale University Art Gallery, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Benton’s paintings of cotton pickers represent the last generation of the occupation, a difficult trade that employed mostly black workers who would be paid according to the weight of their daily haul. Between Benton’s sketches and his finished paintings, automated machinery was introduced, making the process more profitable and efficient and spurring African-Americans to move north for new work as part of the Great Migration.

Study for 'The Cotton Picker' represents a fully-realized sketch for a larger painting of the same subject, which isolates a single worker in front of the fields. As part of his artistic process, Benton created clay models with which he would study their light and shading, resolving problems of single figures before incorporating them into a composition (Henry Adams, Thomas Hart Benton: Drawing from Life, Seattle, 1990, pp. 128-32). Benton may have devised this process because of the challenges associated with large-scale mural work, in which each figure needs to exist in fictive painted space that convinces the eye. The present work is exceptional for its bold color and the monumentality of Benton’s figures, resulting from the artist’s careful study of physical forms.