Chilmark, Massachusetts, was a special place for American artist Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975), a place that he first visited in 1920 and returned to every summer for over fifty years. Benton is often called a Midwestern Regionalist, a painter of Kansas landscapes and Missouri state history. Or he is recognized for his colorful, energetic scenes of modern urban life and industry, such as the ten-panel mural America Today (1930-31), now owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. But it was during the months and years he spent in Chilmark, a small town on the island of Martha's Vineyard south of Cape Cod, that Benton honed the artistic styles and subjects that led to his celebrated reputation as a leading modernist painter.

"It was in Martha's Vinyard that I first really began my intimate study of the American environment and its people," Benton explained in his autobiography, An Artist in America, first published in 1937. He added:

Martha's Vineyard had a profound effect on me. The relaxing sea air, the hot sand on the beaches where we loafed naked, the great and continuous drone of the surf, broke down most of the tenseness which life in the cities had given me. It separated me from the Bohemias of art and put a physical sanity into my life for four months of the year. Providing me with a homely subject matter and a great quiet for reflection... [it] put me in a psychological condition to face America. [1]

...

Benton's neighbor and biographer Polly Burroughs estimated that he produced hundreds of drawings, seven lithographs, and over 200 watercolors and oil paintings during his summers on the island. [2]

Martha's Vineyard was a lifelong touchstone for Benton. In a 1969 Life magazine article chronicling his life and accomplishments at age 80, with photographs by his Menemsha neighbor Alfred Eisenstaedt, Benton remarked "man doesn't escape his environment." [3] For over half a century, the environment of Chilmark, a subset of the larger American Scene, was Benton's primary source of inspiration. He and Rita both died in Kansas City in 1975, Benton in January and Rita in April. Their ashes were scattered around the island, including under trees that they had planted around their Chilmark house decades earlier.

—Excerpt from Erika Doss, "Thomas Hart Benton and Martha's Vineyard," New York: Schoelkopf Gallery, 2024

[1] Thomas Hart Benton, An Artist in America, 4th ed. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983), p. 63

[2] Polly Burroughs, Thomas Hart Benton, A Portrait (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1981), p. 186

[3] William A. McWhirter, "Tom Benton at 80, Still At War with Bores and Boobs," Life (October 3, 1969), p. 70