Thomas Hart Benton: Au Revoir, Paris

"Fire in the Barnyard" by Thomas Hart Benton

"A letter from my father warned me that the money set aside for my education was dwindling and also asked for proof that I was accomplishing something. I had not heretofore thought of submitting pictures to the Salon juries, but I now decided that I had better do so. Acceptance in a Paris salon would indicate to my home folks that I was getting somewhere. I put expensive frames on two of my new pictures and prepared to submit them to the Salon. Sadly they were rejected, and my discouragement increased with the knowledge that my Parisian sojourn was approaching its end.

At this time my mother, with my two younger sisters, arrived suddenly in Paris to see the sights of the city, putting me to some hot and fast scurrying around to disguise my way of life which, though conventional enough for the Quartier Montparnasse, would have seemed odd from a Missouri viewpoint. She brought the news that my father was unwilling to further support my Parisian studies and that I must either find a way to make a living in Paris or return home. As I knew the chances of money making for an American in France were too slim to consider, I reconciled myself to the return. In late July of 1911 I went back to America, to my hometown in Missouri, arriving there just under three years after I had left it.

In my lecture tours of the thirties when questions came up about my Parisian work, I would answer that I had first studied at the Academie Julian and then had painted as an Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist, leaving the sense of a kind of orderly progression. Actually the pattern of my Parisian experience was a most illogical zigzag. I was subjected to too many influences to hold any direct course. I was, in fact, much too young and much too impressionable to lay such a course, and had arrived at no stylistic convictions. Looking back, I think that the best I got out of my stay was an introduction to art history, a love for French literature, and an ability to think in a language other than my own."

To be continued

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