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.

The Granary Gallery in West Tisbury recently acquired the oil on canvas, Thomas Hart Benton’s 1926 train painting Going West.

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.

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.

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.

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.