Island Hay

Inscriptions

Signed, on stone, lower left: Benton; signed, in graphite, lower right margin: Benton; inscribed, in graphite, lower center: [cut off]

Label

As manufacturing soared in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the United States underwent a dramatic period of urbanization. Yet the ideals of rural life—the honesty of labor, providing for one’s family—remained hallmarks of a dominant American cultural identity. George Tice conjures a subtly anachronistic rural idyll in his photograph of an Amish farmstead, depicting a seemingly unchanged way of life amid the social turbulence of the 1960s.

Thomas Hart Benton based his lithograph on a drawing he made in the mid-1920s on Martha’s Vineyard, where he summered for over fifty years. He often sought out as subjects old-time “Yankee” New Englanders who maintained traditional ways of working the land, despite the island’s transition by then to a cosmopolitan summer colony. Here, Benton captured the back-breaking chore of haying using traditional scythes rather than mechanized combine harvesters. We sense the physical exertion and heat of the day through the kneeling laborer quenching his thirst.

From the 2022 exhibition This Land: American Engagement with the Natural World, curated by Jami C. Powell, Curator of Indigenous Art; Barbara J. MacAdam, former Jonathan L. Cohen Curator of American Art; Thomas H. Price, former Curatorial Assistant; Morgan E. Freeman, former DAMLI Native American Art Fellow; and Michael Hartman, Jonathan Little Cohen Associate Curator of American Art

Course History

ARTH 17, The Power of Place: Urban and Rural Images in American Art, 1900-1945, Sarah Powers, Winter 2014

ANTH 7.05, Animals and Humans, Laura Ogden, Winter 2022

GEOG 31.01, Postcolonial Geographies, Erin Collins, Winter 2022

ANTH 50.05, Environmental Archaeology, Madeleine McLeester, Winter 2022

ANTH 50.05, Environmental Archaeology, Madeleine McLeester, Winter 2022

ARTH 5.01, Introduction to Contemporary Art, Mary Coffey and Chad Elias, Winter 2022

ANTH 3.01, Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, Chelsey Kivland, Summer 2022

ANTH 3.01, Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, Chelsey Kivland, Summer 2022

SPAN 65.15, Wonderstruck: Archives and the Production of Knowledge in an Unequal World, Silvia Spitta and Barbara Goebel, Summer 2022

Exhibition History

Looking for America: Prints of Rural Life from the 1930's and 1940's, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, December 3, 1994 - March 5, 1995.

This Land: American Engagement with the Natural World, Rush Family Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, April 12 - July 22, 2022.

Publication History

Barbara J. MacAdam, Looking for America: Prints of Rural Life from the 1930s and 1940s, Hanover, New Hampshire: Trustees of Dartmouth College, 1994, listed no. 6, ill. fig. 1.

Provenance

Associated American Artists, New York; sold to present collection, 1958.

Catalogue Raisonne

C. Fath, The Lithographs of Thomas Hart Benton, Austin, 1979, no. 68.

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