Thomas Hart Benton Analysis

Thomas Hart Benton was an American painter and muralist during the 1930’s. He was born in Neosho, Missouri in 1889, and died in 1975. Benton grew up in a very political family. Because he grew up in a political family, that influenced some of his earlier works as an artist. At age seventeen, he moved to Chicago to study under Frederick Oswald at the Art Institute of Chicago (Source one). Just two years after he arrived at the Art Institute, he began to study Synchronism, which focused on the musical qualities of color. He then moved to New York in 1913 to experiment with his new found interest in Synchronism. He created beautiful pieces of art in his time in New York. Soon after he moved to New York, he was drafted for World War I.

This particular train was a mail train. “Mail trains captured the public’s imagination because they dramatically sped through a station to pick up mail bags that were hung from hooks on the edge of the track”(2). As you can imagine, these trains had a number of wrecks. This Old ’97 was leaving Monroe, Virginia, and it was already an hour late when he hit the curve, and had a huge wreck. This piece of art captured the American life focus Benton was searching for throughout his whole career. This painting contains the epitome of westward expansion in America: trains. Trains were a huge part of American history and American

This piece of art has a very bold and vibrant color scheme, and has a vibrant and dramatic scene as well. Its medium is egg tempera on gessoed masonite. (Hunter Museum of Art). I would say that this painting has a more diagonal line to it because it looks like everything is kind of going in an upward motion. The perspective of Benton’s painting is a picture plane, which is basically the surface of a painting with a frame around it. This painting has a horizontal format with movement from left to right. In my opinion, the painting has a realistic