The Yankee Driver
Artist: Thomas Hart Benton (American, 1889-1975)
Date: 1923
Medium: Oil on canvas
Collection: The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, CA, United States
Description
Thomas Hart Benton spent summers on Martha's Vineyard from 1920 until 1975. The subject of The Yankee Driver is Billy Benson, a weathered Vineyard native who did odd jobs. Despite his craggy features and battered hat, Benson looks ahead with great dignity, firmly in control of his buggy. For Benton, island old-timers stood for traditional values and the American past. The waves and curves animating the composition-from the profile of Benson's sleeve to the wispy clouds-were characteristic of Benton's work.
By the time of this painting, Benton had come to believe that American artists should represent the life, stories, and people they knew, which in his case included the farmers of his native Missouri and the Yankees of Martha's Vineyard. In the 1930s and 1940s, Benton, Grant Wood, and John Steuart Curry would become leaders of the Regionalist group of painters who celebrated American folkways and rural life.
