Thomas Hart Popular Books
Thomas Hart Biography & Facts
Thomas Hart Benton (April 15, 1889 – January 19, 1975) was an American painter, muralist, and printmaker. Along with Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, he was at the forefront of the Regionalist art movement. The fluid, sculpted figures in his paintings showed everyday people in scenes of life in the United States. His work is strongly associated with the Midwestern United States, the region in which he was born and which he called home for most of his life. He also studied in Paris, lived in New York City for more than 20 years and painted scores of works there, summered for 50 years on Martha's Vineyard off the New England coast, and also painted scenes of the American South and West. Early life and education Benton was born in Neosho, Missouri, into an influential family of politicians. He had two younger sisters, Mary and Mildred, and a younger brother, Nathaniel. His mother was Elizabeth Wise Benton and his father, Colonel Maecenas Benton, was a lawyer and four times elected as U.S. congressman. Known as the "little giant of the Ozarks", Maecenas named his son after his own great-uncle, Thomas Hart Benton, one of the first two United States Senators elected from Missouri. Given his father's political career, Benton spent his childhood shuttling between Washington, D.C., and Missouri. His father sent him to Western Military Academy in 1905–06, hoping to shape him for a political career. Growing up in two different cultures, Benton rebelled against his father's plans. He wanted to develop his interest in art, which his mother supported. As a teenager, he worked as a cartoonist for the Joplin American newspaper, in Joplin, Missouri. With his mother's encouragement, in 1907 Benton enrolled at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. Two years later, he moved to Paris in 1909 to continue his art education at the Académie Julian. His mother supported him financially and emotionally to work at art until he married in his early 30s. His sister Mildred said, "My mother was a great power in his growing up." In Paris, Benton met other North American artists, such as the Mexican Diego Rivera and Stanton Macdonald-Wright, an advocate of Synchromism. Influenced by the latter, Benton subsequently adopted a Synchromist style. Early career and World War I After studying in Europe, Benton moved to New York City in 1912 and resumed painting. During World War I, he served in the U.S. Navy and was stationed at Norfolk, Virginia. His war-related work had an enduring effect on his style. He was directed to make drawings and illustrations of shipyard work and life, and this requirement for realistic documentation strongly affected his later style. Later in the war, classified as a "camoufleur", Benton drew the camouflaged ships that entered Norfolk harbor. His work was required for several reasons: to ensure that U.S. ship painters were correctly applying the camouflage schemes, to aid in identifying U.S. ships that might later be lost, and to have records of the ship camouflage of other Allied navies. Benton later said that his work for the Navy "was the most important thing, so far, I had ever done for myself as an artist." Marriage and family At the age of 33, Benton married Rita Piacenza, an Italian immigrant, in 1922. They met while Benton was teaching art classes for a neighborhood organization in New York City, where she was one of his students. They were married for almost 53 years until Benton's death in 1975; Rita died eleven weeks after her husband. The couple had a son, Thomas Piacenza Benton (1926-2010), and a daughter, Jessie Benton, (1939-2023), who became a major figure in the Fort Hill Community founded by Mel Lyman; Benton himself was identified as a "benefactor" to the community, giving them "dozens of paintings". Later career Dedication to Regionalism On his return to New York in the early 1920s, Benton declared himself an "enemy of modernism"; he began the naturalistic and representational work known as Regionalism. He toured America, making sketches and ink wash drawings of the things he saw. He would go back to these sketches again and again as reference for future paintings. He expanded the scale of his Regionalist works, culminating in his America Today murals at the New School for Social Research in 1930–31. In 1984, the murals were purchased and restored by AXA Equitable to hang in the lobby of the AXA Equitable Tower at 1290 Sixth Avenue in New York City. In December 2012, AXA donated the murals to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met's exhibition "Thomas Hart Benton's 'America Today' Mural Rediscovered" ran until April 19, 2015. The murals were described as showing how Benton absorbed and used the influence of the Greek artist El Greco. Benton broke through to the mainstream in 1932. A relative unknown, he won a commission to paint the murals of Indiana life planned by the state in the 1933 Century of Progress Exhibition in Chicago. The Indiana Murals stirred controversy; Benton painted everyday people, and included a portrayal of events in the state's history which some people did not want publicized. Some critics attacked his work for showing Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members in full regalia. The KKK reached its peak membership in 1925. In Indiana, 30% of adult males were estimated to be members of the Klan, and in 1924 KKK members were elected as governor, and to other political offices. These mural panels are now displayed at Indiana University in Bloomington, with the majority hung in the "Hall of Murals" at the Auditorium. Four additional panels are displayed in the former University Theatre (now the Indiana Cinema) connected to the Auditorium. Two panels, including the one with images of the KKK, are located in a lecture classroom at Woodburn Hall. In 1932, Benton also painted The Arts of Life in America, a set of large murals for an early site of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Major panels include Arts of the City, Arts of the West, Arts of the South and Indian Arts. In 1953 five of the panels were purchased by the New Britain Museum of American Art in Connecticut, and have since been displayed there. On December 24, 1934, Benton was featured on one of the earliest color covers of Time magazine. Benton's work was featured along with that of fellow Midwesterners Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry in an article entitled "The U.S. Scene". The trio were featured as the new heroes of American art, and Regionalism was described as a significant art movement. In 1935, after he had "alienated both the left-leaning community of artists with his disregard for politics and the larger New York-Paris art world with what was considered his folksy style", Benton left the artistic debates of New York for his native Missouri. He was commissioned to create a mural for the Missouri State Capitol in Jefferson City. A Social History of Missouri is perhaps Benton's greatest work. In an interview in 1973, he said, "If I have any right to make judgments,.... Discover the Thomas Hart popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Thomas Hart books.
Best Seller Thomas Hart Books of 2024
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One More Christmas at the Castle
Trisha Ashley'The ultimate in feelgood fiction reads, it will fill your heart with Christmas spirit.' Milly Johnson, author of Woman in the MiddleThis Christmas will be the most special of them...
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Love Without End
Robin Lee HatcherFor two single parents with bruised hearts, it’ll take more than a little courage to get back on the horse when it comes to love.Kimberly Welch lost her husband to a heart attack i...
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Chasing the Italian Dream
Jo ThomasFrom the bestselling author of Escape to the French Farmhouse comes a deliciously feelgood story about making your dreams come true, set in sunkissed southern Italy.'A tale full of...
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Why the Right Went Wrong
E.J. DionneFrom the author of Why Americans Hate Politics, the New York Times bestselling and “notably fairminded” (The New York Times Book Review), story of the GOP’s fracturingfrom the 1964...
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Scalia
Bruce Allen Murphy“[Murphy’s] biography of Justice Scalia is patient and thorough, alive both intellectually and morally….Functions as an MRI scan of one of the most influential conservative thinker...
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Thomas Hart Benton
Theodore RooseveltEven before the end of the Revolutionary War the movement had begun which was to change in form a straggling chain of seaboard republics into a mighty continental nation, the great...
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Thomas Hart Benton
Justin WolffBorn in Missouri at the end of the nineteenth century, Thomas Hart Benton would become the most notorious and celebrated painter America had ever seen. The first artist to make the...
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The Wisdom Codes
Gregg BradenThe cutting edge of neurolinguistics meets the spiritual wisdom of the ages in a handbook of key words that literally rewire our brains.New discoveries in biology and the neuroscie...
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It Must Have Been the Mistletoe
Judy AstleyLet muchloved and everpopular author Judy Astley gift you an unmissable, hilarious and heartwarming read this Christmas. Perfect for fans of Katie Fforde, Trisha Ashley, Jenny Colg...
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The Promise of an Angel
Ruth ReidInterrupting the ordered routine of the Mecosta County Amish settlement, an angelic visitor awakens Judith to a new faith.All Judith Fischer ever wanted is to marry within her comm...
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Valorar
Gary ThomasValorar te enseña cómo vivir todos los días ese matrimonio que deseas tener. Este libro no solo se centra en amar a tu cónyuge, sino en apreciarlo: atesorarlo, honrarlo, tener...
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The Little Ship
Margaret MayhewFrom bestselling author Margaret Mayhew, an emotional and gripping wartime saga, full of the tension and adventure of World War Two. Perfect for fans of Katie Flynn, Donna Douglas ...
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Easy on the Heart
Jodi ThomasThere’s nothing like a cowboy to stir a lady’s imaginationand nobody can do it better than New York Times bestselling author Jodi Thomas.It’s Cooper Adams’s thirtieth birthday and ...
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Average Expectations
Shep RoseThis witty and engaging collection of essays from the charismatic star of Southern Charm offers riproaring stories and tongueincheek advice on everything from relationships to trav...
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La Templanza
María DueñasLa autora bestseller de El Tiempo Entre Costuras, María Dueñas nos regala una novela brillante, un tributo a las segundas oportunidades y al poder irrefrenable del amor.Nada hacía ...
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Tycho and Kepler
Kitty FergusonThe extraordinary, unlikely tale of Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler and their enormous contribution to astronomy and understanding of the cosmos is one of the strangest stories in ...
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William Wallace
Dr James MackaySir William Wallace of Ellerslie is one of history's greatest heroes, but also one of its greatest enigmas a shadowy figure whose edges have been blurred by myth and legend. E...
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Crying in the Dark
Shane DunphyFour extraordinary true stories ... Bobby and Micky, six and four, controlled from beyond the grave by their evil father ... Mina, seventeen, who has Downs Syndrome, desperate to b...
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The Five of Hearts
Patricia O'TooleThe Five of Hearts, who first gathered in Washington in the Gilded Age, included Henry Adams, historian and scion of America's first political dynasty; his wife, Clover, gifted pho...
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Petersburg
Andrei Bely & David McDuffAndrei Bely's Petersburg is a colourful evocation of Russia's capital during the short, turbulent period of the first socialist revolution in 1905. Considered Bely's masterpiece, t...
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Untouchable
Mulk Raj AnandMulk Raj Anand's extraordinarily powerful story of an Untouchable in India's caste system, with a new introduction by Ramachandra Guha, author of GandhiBakha is a proud and attract...
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Five Farthings
Susan SallisIf you like Maeve Binchy, Fiona Valpy and Rosamunde Pilcher, you'll absolutely love this beautifully emotive and compelling novel of love and loss from The Sunday Times bestselling...
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Bluebirds
Margaret MayhewFrom bestselling author Margaret Mayhew, a gripping wartime pageturner, full of the tension, emotion and adventure of World War II. Perfect for fans of Katie Flynn, Donna Douglas a...
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Lone Heart Pass
Jodi ThomasThe Ransom Canyon series is coming soon to Netflix starring Josh Duhamel and Minka Kelly!Where family bonds are made and broken, and where young love sparks as old flames grow dim,...
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Pillow Talk
Craig ConoverPerfect for fans of One Day You’ll Thank Me and Capital Gaines, the star of Southern Charm and cofounder and CMO of Sewing Down South reveals how he turned his passion for sewing i...
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My Own Words
Ruth Bader GinsburgThe New York Times bestselling book from Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg“a comprehensive look inside her brilliantly analytical, entertainingly wry mind, revealing the fa...
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Effi Briest
Theodor Fontane & Hugh RorrisonUnworldly young Effi Briest is married off to Baron von Innstetten, an austere and ambitious civil servant twice her age, who has little time for his new wife. Isolated and bored, ...
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Harbor of the Heart
Katherine SpencerThe people of Angel Island find a safe harbor and the gift of hope in this inspirational novel from New York Times bestselling authors Thomas Kinkade and Katherine Spencer. Liza Ma...
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A Wandering Heart
Thomas Kinkade & Katherine SpencerAll the stars come out in Angel Island in this charming, inspirational novel from New York Times bestselling authors Thomas Kinkade and Katherine Spencer.A movie crew arrives to sh...
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Christmas in Winter Valley
Jodi ThomasThe Ransom Canyon series is coming soon to Netflix starring Josh Duhamel and Minka Kelly!Ransom Canyon welcomes you back for a Christmas that has everything you’re looking for: rom...
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Western Hearts
Debbie Macomber & Jodi ThomasTwo emotional stories of finding home in the WestMontana by Debbie MacomberWhen Molly learns that her grandfather is ill, she packs up her sons without a second thought and makes t...
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Our Crime Was Being Jewish
Anthony S. Pitch & Michael BerenbaumIn the shouted words of a woman bound for Auschwitz to a man about to escape from a cattle car, “If you get out, maybe you can tell the story! Who else will tell it?”Our Crime Was ...
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The Vineyard
María DueñasNew York Times bestselling author Maria Dueñas returns with The Vineyard, a magnificent story “destined to become a classic” (Armando Lucas Correa, bestselling author of The German...
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A Good Heart is Hard to Find
Trisha Ashley'Trisha Ashley writes with remarkable wit and originality one of the best writers around' KATIE FFORDE, author of A Springtime AffairIt is a truth universally acknowledged that a ...
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The Complete English Poems
John DonneNo poet has been more wilfully contradictory than John Donne, whose works forge unforgettable connections between extremes of passion and mental energy. From satire to tender elegy...
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Loving Him Well
Gary ThomasThe bestselling author of Sacred Marriage offers hope to women who want to strengthen and transform their marriages into the profoundly deep relationships God intended....
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Where The Light Gets In
Lucy Dillon'Lucy Dillon's books never fail to make me happy' Jenny Colgan'Deeply moving' Sophie Kinsella'I felt bereft for having finished it' Milly JohnsonSometimes the cracks in your heart ...
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The Bhagavad Gita
Laurie L. PattonPart of the ancient Hindu epic The Mahabharata, The Bhagavad Gita is one of the enduring religious texts of the worldThe Bhagavad Gita is an early poem that recounts the conversati...
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Sweet Caroline
Rachel HauckCaroline serves others with little time to enjoy the sweeter parts of life. Until her old boyfriend returns to townand she's given a second chance at first love.Life hasn't always ...
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The Little Teashop of Lost and Found
Trisha Ashley'Trisha Ashley writes with remarkable wit and originality one of the best writers around.' KATIE FFORDE‘Trisha at her best.’ CAROLE MATTHEWSAlice Rose is a foundling, discovered o...
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Buried Deep
Susan Wilkins‘Compulsive and thoroughly captivating… I found myself unable to tear myself away and as a consequence read it all in a single tense sitting… bags of suspense and action wrapped up...