In 1968 Thomas Hart Benton took a sÿketching trip down the Buffalo River in Arkansas. Two large watercolors as well as a tempera of the Fisherman's Camp, depicting his camp near a landmark known as the Bat House were exhibited later that summer at Graham Gallery. Robert Sanford described the trip in an article for the July 1968 issue of Auto Club News:

Being the way it is, the Buffalo has admirers in numbers, from Boy Scouts to poets. Among them is Thomas Hart Benton, distinguished painter of the American Scene, a man who knows a vista when he sees one...With a specific scene in mind, Benton went back to the Buffalo last month...to sketch a bluff known as the Bat House. The Bat House, a solid mass of rock about 100 feet high, had three tunnel-like openings about 15 feet high at the water level that had been worn there by the river. Legend had it that caverns once extended up inside the rock and that bats lived there. We didn't see any. That didn't disappoint Benton. "That's a fine piece of natural sculpture," he said. Truman [the guide] put it another way: "This is about as pretty a place as there is on the whole river. The Old Man has a good eye, all right."

A copy of the article will accompany the lot.