Thomas Hart Benton 1889-1975

Flight of the Thielens, 1938 belongs to a small series of works Thomas Hart Benton created depicting the terrifying circumstances of a catastrophic strength hurricane that hit Martha's Vineyard in 1938. With little advanced warning, the hurricane dubbed the 'Long Island Express' caused widespread damage to the island. The present large-scale oil painting depicts Benton's neighbors fleeing their homes, battling the swirling sea. Benton's narrative of this moment depicts Benedict Thielen, who was a well-regarded writer for the New Yorker, his wife, the artist Virginia Berresford, and their maid Lucy. When the storm hit the island, homes were pelted with flying rocks and debris, and a large wave associated with storm surge washed over the barrier beach on which the Thielens and Bentons lived and washed into Stonewall Pond. The Thielen's maid, Lucy, did not know how to swim and was lost in the storm.

In 1938, Benton was at the peak of his artistic career and among the most famous artists in America. Flight of the Thielens became a favored composition of the artist and an acclaimed subject, as it was selected to represent the best of American art through participation in a loan program to the American Ambassador to Canada's residence in Ottawa in 1992. Well-known art historian Henry Adams LaFarge wrote: "The Regionalists movement had, of course, many offshoots, but rarely was it capable of reaching heights of drama and passion that are found in this painting… The abstract structure in its swirling design harks back, like many Benton paintings, to the dynamic tension and chiaroscuro of sixteenth-century Mannerism." [1]

[1] Henry Adams LaFarge, cited in Polly Burroughs, Thomas Hart Benton: A Portrait, Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1981