This work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné being prepared by the Thomas Hart Benton Catalogue Raisonné Foundation. Committee Members: Dr. Henry Adams, Anthony Benton Gude, Andrew Thompson and Michael Owen.

Self-portraits are comparable to diary pages: highly subjective expressions of personal appearance and character framed by autobiographical context and states of mind. Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975) painted multiple self-portraits throughout his long career, each one a revelation of his self-fashioning as a modern American artist. From an early portrait showing him dressed in a gray suit and tie and sporting a dark mustache, painted during the winter of 1909–10 in Paris, to a 1970 likeness showing him now with a gray mustache, wearing a baggy pair of jeans and a loose-fitting green jacket, standing in front of an easel in his Kansas City studio and clutching brushes in both hands, Benton always cast himself as a somber, forthright, and sometimes quarrelsome artist (fig. 1). As he put it in the early 1970s, “I am by no means yet a walking tub of sweetness and light.” [1]

Benton almost always depicted himself in three-quarter views, with his right side facing the viewer. Most of his self-portraits were unflinchingly honest in terms of his physical appearance, not unlike Rembrandt’s multiple pictures of himself tallying the tangible effects of aging, the confirmation of mortality. They similarly reveal a direct, bold, and even aggressive scrutiny of himself and his audience. Whether dressed in a formal suit or in comfortable clothes, Benton’s self-portraits provide a visual autobiography of an artist who took his choice of profession seriously—and expected others to see him that way.

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Benton began depicting himself as an artist-worker in the 1920s. Earlier self-portraits, showing him dressed in a suit and tie, and practically glowering at the viewer, did not identify Benton as an artist. In later portraits, he eschewed the dark, formal outfits of the modern artiste, as well as any pretense of glamor and sophistication. He focused instead on depicting the tools of his trade, reflecting his burgeoning self-confidence as a modern American artist while also sustaining an intensely critical scrutiny of himself and his audience.

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As Benton matured, settling into a reputation as the grand old man of twentieth-century American art, his aggressive self-posturing mellowed. Self-portraits painted in 1970 (fig. 9) and 1974 (fig. 10) show the artist at work in his home studio, brushes in hand, dressed comfortably and casually. Unafraid to paint the effect of aging, he openly revealed his wrinkled brow, gray hair, and gnarled hands. While still directly and intently scrutinizing himself and his audience, Benton appears less skeptical, less unforgiving than in the self-portraits he painted as a younger man.

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In a chapter titled “Life” in an unfinished autobiography that he worked on in the early 1970s, Benton assessed the changes in his character, and his understanding of himself, in later years:

Up to the time I was forty years old I was almost constantly on the defense against something which was really within me. After that time I came to take a philosophical view of my “ups” and “downs.” I began to be amused at the way they affected me and I learned to laugh at myself and at the things in my work and in my environment which barked the shins of my soul. Today I laugh most of the time, not always openly, but sort of in myself. I’ve learned to take my struggles and my failures and life also with very little grimness.

Toward the end of the chapter, reflecting on themes of loss, melancholy, and old age, Benton wrote: “If you have good sense and want to relish your days you don’t brood over this. You occupy yourself with work, you go look at things, you think of something funny about yourself and laugh.”13 Following his own advice, Benton died working in his studio, having just put the finishing touches on his large-scale, six-by-ten-foot mural The Sources of Country Music.

[1] Thomas Hart Benton, Chapter 10, "Part 5: Life," p. 74, in an unfinished and unpublished autobiography written c. 1970. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

—Excerpt from Erika Doss, "Thomas Hart Benton’s Self-Portraits,” New York: Schoelkopf Gallery, 2025