The Chute, Buffalo River Above Willems Landing

Among America’s greatest visual storytellers, Thomas Hart Benton captured the majesty and mythology of the heartland in his stunning paintings of the nation’s landscape and its people. The present work recalls Benton's intimate connection to the American landscape. In the 1960s and 70s, Benton spent almost every spring on float trips in Missouri and northwest Arkansas, using his surroundings as the primary inspiration for his art. The present painting may depict a point near Woolum's Landing along the Buffalo River. Reminiscing about his many river trips in the Ozarks, Benton wrote: "For years I've floated down these rivers every Spring either by canoe or ‘jon’ boat, an extra-long sort of skiff. Sometimes the water is fast and rough, at other times it slows up in deep pools. Generally, the river floaters I run with make camp at the end of the day on the gravel bars lining one of these pools and fish them while supper is cooked." (as quoted in C. Fath, The Lithographs of Thomas Hart Benton, Austin, Texas, 1979, p. 192) The present work captures Benton’s admiration for the landscape, complete with the winding, ever-changing river that fascinated him.

As Michael Baigell notes, "The streams, gullies, and soft hills of the Middle West—the vacation lands of the artist's mature years—become idyllic haunts of weekend fishermen and Sunday boatmen. The tumult of spirit in earlier paintings has given way to the continuous, easy pulsation of curving water banks [and] clumps of trees...Other American artists have celebrated the American landscape, but few with such joy and innocence. Benton painted these works, one imagines, to please himself...Yet they are personal in a way easily accessible to anybody. Their meanings are still American. Benton is still a painter of the American scene." (Thomas Hart Benton, New York, 1975, p. 187)