Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) American, "The Music Lesson" Signed Original Lithograph. Depicts a man with a guitar showing a curious girl how to form a chord. Signed in print bottom left, and in pencil bottom right. A bio with the title of the piece is attached to the back, along with a flier and label from David Bendann's Fine Art Rooms and the Tomlinson Collection in Baltimore. 

Overall Size: 16 1/2 x 19 1/4 in. 

Sight Size: 10 1/2 x 13 in. 

Thomas Hart Benton was born on April 15th, 1889, in Neosho, Missouri, and dropped out of high school at 17 to work as a cartoonist for the Joplin American newspaper before enrolling for a year at the Western Military Academy in Alton, Illinois in 1906. He attended the Art Institute of Chicago and then traveled to Paris to study at the Académie Julian, where he met and was inspired by California artist Stanton Macdonald-Wright’s synchromist style of abstract painting, and in 1911 he returned to the United States and settled in New York, teaching briefly at the Chelsea Neighborhood Association where he met his future wife, Rita Piacenza, one of his students. During World War I Benton served at the naval base in Norfolk, Virginia, where he made illustrations for a catalog of ships and military equipment, and his work until the early 1920s was generally modernist and often abstract until he revisited Missouri in 1924 to care for his sick father, when he began to focus instead on American rural subjects such as life in steel mills, logging camps, coal mines, and cotton fields, developing leftist political leanings that led him to champion working class people and represent them as heroes in his paintings and murals, heavily influenced by El Greco in his mural paintings across the country. Throughout this period Benton was an influential teacher at the Art Students League in New York until settling permanently in Kansas City, Missouri in 1935, but his style as well as his politics fell out of favor during World War II, and he died in relative obscurity of a heart attack on January 19th, 1975, although reevaluation of his work in the decades since has solidified his position as one of the most important regionalist American painters of the 20th Century.

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