Jessie Benton, daughter of renowned artist Thomas Hart Benton, died surrounded by family in Los Angeles on Feb. 16, at the age of 83. She had been a seasonal resident of Chilmark all her life.
The daughter of Thomas Hart Benton and her three children are suing the Kansas City bank entrusted with administering the estate of the renowned artist.
Jessie Benton’s comfortable summer home in Chilmark was just a shack on a windy hill when her parents, the painters Thomas Hart Benton and Rita Piacenza, bought it in 1923.
The world knows Thomas Hart Benton as one of the most iconic painters of 20th-century America, his work as recognizable as that of Grant Wood or Edward Hopper.
In the late summer of 1953, the artists Thomas Hart Benton and Denys Wortman sat for each other in Benton’s Chilmark studio for what became a dual portrait session, dubbed “the Battle of Beetlebung Corners” (sic) by Collier’s magazine that October.
Twenty-five years ago, artist Thomas Hart Benton put on paper the spirit of the Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society Livestock Show and Fair.
Now the spirit of the fair as depicted by Mr. Benton is available on cotton as well.
The Benton egg tempera from 1967, entitled The Fair, is the design on this year’s fair T-shirts and posters. The T-shirts finally became available yesterday.
Bach, Beethoven, and Schubert - nothing heavy but on the classical side - and Thomas Hart Benton, painter, and author, plays them all on his harmonica. He’s got a special scheme, which he himself devised, for transposing the music into a complicated harmonica score.
He was walking along the state road with his wife up in West Tisbury. He carried a suitcase, and, although he did not actually wiggle his thumb, he looked hopefully back at the car.
His name is Manuel Tolegian of New York city, artist and former student of Thomas H. Benton, summer resident of Chilmark. When he was picked up by the Gazette reporter, he looked slightly warm but grateful, animated and eager. He has a thin, aesthetic face and long, slender hands.
The Thomas Hart Benton painting Roasting Ears holds an important place in American art history, and now it holds a place on the walls of the Granary Gallery in West Tisbury.
