Thomas Hart Benton was born in Neosho, Missouri into a family with an extensive history of producing influential lawyers and politicians. Benton was named for his great uncle, the Senator Thomas Hart Benton, and from this earliest point in his life, Benton was expected to follow in the family’s ambitious footsteps. Benton’s father, Maecenas Eason Benton, was a formidable man, and father and son chafed against each other for much, if not all, of Benton’s life. Maecenas Benton never came to terms with his eldest son’s artistic proclivities, even as it became clear that nothing would deter Benton from the artist’s path.

Eventually, following a year spent in military academy at his father’s insistence, Benton was permitted to pursue his craft of choice. He first studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and later, at Academie Julian in Paris. Though Benton’s initial goal was a career in illustration, burgeoned by an early job as a cartoonist for the Joplin American, Benton quickly discovered that his passion lay in painting. He wrote that “from the moment I first stuck my brush in a fat gob of color I gave up the idea of newspaper cartooning.” Benton found further inspiration in his studies from collaboration with fellow artists, namely Stanton Macdonald-Wright, who would later co-found the Synchronist movement. Throughout the early decades of the 20th century, however, Benton struggled to develop a method and style that felt authentic; he was dissatisfied both with a traditional, academic style of painting and with the fast-growing modernisms popular in Paris.

A stint in the Navy in 1918, following several years of poverty and unfruitful experimentation in New York City, led Benton to depict the activities of the Navy in quick, descriptive drawings. This activity reconnected Benton with his love for “working directly from nature,” which, as recalled by Benton, “was the most important thing that, so far, I had ever done for myself as an artist” (Andrew Austin Thompson, Thomas Hart Benton). This rekindling of Benton’s passion for artmaking provided the ideal stepping stone for Benton when, two years later, he came for the first time to Martha’s Vineyard. Benton’s girlfriend (and future wife) Rita introduced him to the Island, believing he needed a break from urban dwelling. The “American scene” was Benton’s subject and he wrote that–– amidst the beautiful Island landscape and the eccentric, storied inhabitants of Martha’s Vineyard–– “I found it first here.” It was on the Island, under these unique conditions, that Benton’s work reached its “complete artistic realization,” a combination of the logical and emotional/instinctual aspects of Benton’s personhood (Sam Low on Thomas Benton). Benton returned to the Island every summer for the rest of his life, though he put his new-found artistic method to work across the entirety of the United States of America, ever committed to depicting the authentic experience of American life.

Benton’s methods are most “striking” in their combining of a “clear visual organization with a sense of energy and movement.” Flowers in the Wood (1947) is a wonderful example of Benton’s signature synthesis of clarity and motion–– the pink wild roses wind their way up the knotted tree trunk, jumping from the canvas as if alive. The spiral composition was a “favorite technique” of Benton’s, in which he organized forms “in spiraling movement around a real or implied vertical pole.” In Flowers in the Wood, the central branch acts as the pole and encourages the lively upwards movement of the flowers.

Benton’s daughter, Jessie, recalled hours spent in her father’s Chilmark studio. “I loved the enormous inner silence,” Jessie wrote, “the rhythm of my father moving forward to paint and backward to look, and his funny incessant whistling without whistling.” One can imagine Benton at work on Flowers, engaged in the sort of dance with his canvas which Jessie describes. Benton’s passion for music translates directly into his work and imbues his paintings with a kinetic quality beyond compositional movement, something more instinctual, or natural. Indeed, there is an inherent connectivity within Flowers: the background trees and clouds follow the contours of the central trunk and flowers, each aspect of the painting transitioning seamlessly from one to the next.

The closeness and harmony of nature present in Flowers in the Wood harkens back to Jessie’s close relationship with her father, made manifest in the many paintings he created of and for her, such as the works he painted to mark each of her birthdays. Flowers in the Wood, painted in 1947, was a gift for Jessie. It is apparent that Benton had his daughter in mind while working on Flowers: the painting demonstrates the care and love he felt both towards the making of art and to his young daughter.