American and European Art

Property from the Collection of the Anne P. Foster Trust, Kansas City, Missouri Provenance: Collection of the artist Purchased from the above by the present owner Literature: Thomas Hart Benton, Benton Drawings: A Collection of Drawings by Thomas Hart Benton, Columbia, 1968, p. 47, illus. Lot note: Thomas Hart Benton, painter of American life and history, was a restless man with seemingly endless energy for travel. As a child, he grew up listening to stories of his maternal grandfather, Pappy Wise, and his affliction with "foot itch" that led him to ramble throughout Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri and Texas. His own father, a U.S. representative for Missouri, likewise nostalgically reminisced of his travels during his Ozark campaigns. After his father's death in 1924, Benton was inspired to go on his own journeys to see for himself the variety and picturesqueness of the people of America. He traveled throughout the Ozarks and Texas, and in 1928 made an extended trip to the Appalachians, Wyoming and the Rockies. Benton continued to make visits to Appalachia in the early 1930s, and in 1934 he traveled to West Virginia with his student, Bill Hayden, and an Italian newspaper correspondent. While there, the three men encountered members of the Holy Roller faith, whose services relied heavily on the use of musical instruments. Always looking for characters and particularly American scenes to capture and use as material for later paintings, Benton finagled an invitation to a Holy Roller gathering, where he sketched West Virginia Mountain Church. In this work, the artist depicts a working class audience in a simple church, quietly enjoying the music of a fiddler and guitarist. The two musicians are bathed in the white light of a coal-mining lamp and they stand above the crowd, the focus of all attention. The scene is contemplative, perhaps executed before a woman preacher stepped onto the stage and, as Benton described it "…the congregation burst into voice. The rafters shook. Three or four roaring hymns were sung and stamped" (An Artist in America, p. 106). A "knifing" outside the building eventually interrupted the raucous energy of the church service, with a young boy only slightly wounded and his assailant captured. The drawing belies none of the drama to come, but instead captures a reflective moment, a calm before a spiritual and secular storm. The figure of the guitar player in West Virginia Mountain Church may be a model for the guitar player in Lord Heal the Child (Private Collection), also executed in 1934. Lord Heal the Child similarly features a woman preacher, as described in Benton's account of his experience, and may be a composite of different scenes that the artist sketched during his trip.

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