Thomas Hart Benton: First Studies

Thomas Hart Benton

In his autobiography, artist Thomas Hart Benton wrote: "Although I had drawn pictures of one sort or another from earliest childhood, the first actual instruction I remember receiving was at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., when my father was in Congress. Saturday morning classes for young people were conducted there, but I was not much inspired because we drew from wooden cubes and other geometric figures, the very appearance of which was forbidding.

I preferred as models for my picture-making the engravings in my father's history books, especially those which showed bloody looking battles. I became quite proficient at this - enough so, when I was seventeen, to hold down a job as cartoonist for the Joplin American, a newspaper in the bustling lead and zinc center of Joplin, Missouri. My success there set me to thinking of journalistic art as a permanent pursuit.

In order to improve my drawing for such a career, I enrolled in February of 1907 at the Chicago Art Institute. Shortly after my arrival there, however, my ideas of the future began to change. A very sympathetic teacher, Frederick Oswald, in one of whose classes I had enrolled, induced me to try painting in watercolor. The experience proved fascinating and soon so engrossed my attention that I forgot my journalistic ambitions.

I obtained also in Chicago my first insights into the art of designing - of consciously planning, or composing, pictures before attempting to execute them. Oswald was enthusiastic about Japanese prints and encouraged continuous study of the way they were put together. Through continued observation of the prints, I learned to arrange my pictures in definite patterns and acquired a taste, from such artists as Hokusai, for flowing lines which lasted all my life."

To be continued

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