On May 19 Sotheby’s will present its spring American art sale in New York City. The sale, which will feature around 70 major works, will include an important Thomas Hart Benton painting once owned by Marylou Whitney, who has strong links to the Whitney Western Art Museum at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming.
The work, titled Noon, was created by the famous regionalist painter in 1939 and shows a farmer going about his daily chores on a half-tilled section of farmland. Two mules or horses are hitched to a tiller underneath a tree, with a distant farmhouse barely visible over Benton’s famous swooping hills. The painting, tempera and oil on board, is estimated at $700,000 to $1 million.
Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975), Noon, 1939, tempera and oil on board, 22 x 28” Estimate: $700/1,00,000“It’s an incredibly dynamic composition, with the figure and the two horses and a really wonderful background and landscape. It includes all the elements you are looking for with a Benton,” says Sotheby’s American art specialist Charlotte Mitchell. “It really comes to life when you see it, especially the undulating hills, remarkable clouds and the flowers in the foreground.”
Marylou Whitney’s second husband, Cornelius Vanderbilt “Sonny” Whitney, was the son of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the artist and art patron whose name is now on the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Gertrude’s art and philanthropy, as well as the continued work of her son, would also play an important role in the founding of the Whitney Western Art Museum at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. After Sonny died in 1992, Marylou continued supporting the Wyoming museum in his honor.
Other pieces joining the Benton in the May sale include pieces by Francis Augustus Silva, Fairfield Porter and Herbert Hasetine.
Interested bidders are encouraged to check on the status of the show at www.sothebys.com.
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