The daughter of Thomas Hart Benton and her three children are suing the Kansas City bank entrusted with administering the estate of the renowned artist.
Jessie Benton’s comfortable summer home in Chilmark was just a shack on a windy hill when her parents, the painters Thomas Hart Benton and Rita Piacenza, bought it in 1923.
The world knows Thomas Hart Benton as one of the most iconic painters of 20th-century America, his work as recognizable as that of Grant Wood or Edward Hopper.
In the late summer of 1953, the artists Thomas Hart Benton and Denys Wortman sat for each other in Benton’s Chilmark studio for what became a dual portrait session, dubbed “the Battle of Beetlebung Corners” (sic) by Collier’s magazine that October.
The Thomas Hart Benton painting Roasting Ears holds an important place in American art history, and now it holds a place on the walls of the Granary Gallery in West Tisbury.
