Thomas Hart Benton: Art Institute of Chicago

Portrait by Louis Betts, Benton's Painting Teacher

"I first undertook oil painting in the class of a kindly and complaisant elderly artist named Freer and then in the classes of Louis Betts, a fashionable portrait painter of the time. Betts was a brushwork virtuoso who followed Sargent, Chase, and others of that school. I was not officially enrolled in the classes, but with the easy discipline of the Chicago Art Institute, I simply moved in. 

Both Freer and Betts favored a limited palette, at least for beginners. Since I was to come back to this palette - or one close to it - time after time in my later painting, it had better be described. I was composed of white and black, yellow ochre, burnt sienna, a Venetian red, and a green oxide dulled with black. Occasionally a blue might be added. 

This limited range of color encouraged free brush drawing which, particularly with Betts, was essential to 'vital' painting. The chief models for study in his classes were Frans Hals and Velazquez, enlarged reproductions of whose works were tacked up about the classroom walls. 

With teacher Frederick Oswald's encouragement and through the influence of a letter which he wrote to my parents, I went to Paris, France, in mid-August of 1908, enrolling a little later for the autumn term at the Academie Julian."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "An American in Art: A Professional and Technical Autobiography" by Thomas Hart Benton.)