Thomas Hart Benton, Portrait of the Old Guy, 1938

1938

Medium

Tempera on board

Dimensions

45.1 × 34.3 cm

Status

In Gallery Collection

Collect24 Art ID

C24-744222

Thomas Hart Benton (1889, Neosho, MO – 1975, Kansas City, MO) was a painter at the vanguard of the American regionalist movement. His figurative paintings depicted the lives of modern working-class Americans, often offering incisive critiques of Depression-era society. In addition to his portraits, he was lauded for his murals, one of which occupies an entire room in the Metropolitan Museum’s permanent collection. Although in postwar America abstraction replaced regionalism’s influence in visual culture, Benton’s lifelong role teaching young artists, like Jackson Pollock, evinces his enduring impact on art history. Benton’s works are in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC.