Throughout his career, Thomas Hart Benton remained committed to painting scenes of American life and labor and frequently positioned his work as a means through which to examine and challenge American history. The subject of cotton pickers, for instance, is an important recurring motif in the artist’s body of work. Benton first saw people picking cotton in Georgia on a trip in the late 1920s, and he returned to the subject over the subsequent decades, as in Edge of the Field (Cotton Pickers). Cotton sharecropping had developed in the United States following the Civil War as a means for wealthy landowners to rent to poor farmers in exchange for a percentage of the harvest, an exploitative practice that became widely understood as a reflection of a racially unjust system. In 1943, when this example was begun, sharecropping was beginning to recede in the United States.