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 at a 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 steppingstone 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.” Listening to the old islanders and immersing himself in his verdant, hilly surroundings, Benton was able "to [get] in touch with what was real.” 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).

Indeed, Benton’s methods were “striking” in their combining of “clear visual organization with a sense of energy and movement.” In Menemsha (1952), this co-existence of clarity and energy is demonstrated with the culminated mastery of several decades of summers spent working on Martha’s Vineyard. The vibrancy of Benton’s palette and the ease with which he has manipulated the paint make Menemsha a memorable work. Brilliant green land cradles calm, crystalline water and human presence is a peaceful thing: a lone man rows a small, red boat and the hills are dotted with only a smattering of homes. In the 1950s, Benton “began an artistic retreat… into the wilderness and into the past.” At the time of painting Menemsha, Benton had recently suffered a near-fatal heart attack and had soon after lost his mother. Also, the industrialization of America during and after World War II meant that Benton’s rural America began to vanish. Menemsha is an example of the inward-turning nature of Benton’s art in the 1950s, in which the surroundings are intimate, and the human subject is made distant, representing the distance Benton had begun to feel towards his contemporary America.

Nonetheless, Menemsha is formally a quintessential Benton painting. It follows his famously genius principles for form as laid out in his 1926-27 essay “Mechanics of Form Organization in Painting,” which was and is followed by a number of artists, namely Benton’s student Jackson Pollock. Benton’s favored method was to “organize forms in spiraling movement around a real or implied vertical pole.” Menemsha demonstrates this beautifully, with a musical sense of movement concentrated around Benton’s central “pole”.

It is no wonder that Benton looked back on the Vineyard as “the only place I ever found peace.” The sense of calm and beauty that so nourished Benton creatively and personally permeates through the canvases of his vineyard paintings, lending the same peace to viewers, something incredibly rare and valuable in our ever-modernizing world.