Last summer, my mother came across this photograph of the painter and longtime seasonal Vineyard resident Thomas Hart Benton while rummaging in her house on Menemsha Pond. It was taken in the summer of 1960 by my father, Wally Scheuer (who died in 2004), on his motorboat, either on Menemsha Pond or the Vineyard Sound.

My parents and paternal grandparents were friends and neighbors of the Bentons, with adjoining properties straddling the then-Chilmark-Gay Head town line just east of Herring Creek.

A Thomas Hart Benton Vineyard landscape painting will go on the auction block Thursday at the Swann Galleries in New York city. The painting is from Mr. Benton’s early work, estimated to have been painted in the 1920s when Mr. Benton and his wife, Rita, first began summering on the Vineyard. Titled Landscape, Martha’s Vineyard, the painting is oil on paper, circa 1922-24.

The painting’s more abstract look is indicative of Benton’s early to mid-career work, according to Todd Weyman, a Benton expert at Swann Galleries.

To unenlightened art history students Thomas Hart Benton is the champion of the heartland, a standard bearer for the Midwestern agrarian ideal. But a closer look at his paintings reveals the influence of an Island a world away.