Thomas Hart Benton Home and Studio State Historic Site

Thomas Hart Benton was born in Neosho in 1889, the son of Congressman Maecenas E. Benton and a great-great-nephew of Missouri's first senator, whose name he carried. He studied in Chicago and Paris, served six months as a Navy draftsman in World War I, and in New York taught at the Art Students League, where Jackson Pollock was his student. Murals of American life made him the leader of the Regionalist painters of the 1930s. In 1935 he came home to paint the mural in the State Capitol and to teach at the Kansas City Art Institute.

From 1939 until his death he lived in this two-and-a-half-story house of quarried limestone in the Roanoke neighborhood. Its rooms hold his paintings and sculpture, some original and some reproduced, a baby grand piano, and pictures of his son playing the flute and his daughter the guitar. Benton played harmonica and even recorded an album. The second-floor library holds the books he read to get his details right, and he planned many paintings by first modeling the scene in clay.

In the early 1940s he turned half of the carriage house into a studio and put in an 8-by-12-foot window on the north side for steady light. He died there on January 19, 1975, just after finishing The Sources of Country Music for the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville. The studio holds nearly all of his own things, with brushes standing in coffee cans and a stretched canvas waiting.