Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975) was a leading American painter, muralist, and key figure of the Regionalist art movement. Alongside artists like Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, he famously rejected European avant-garde abstraction in favor of highly stylized, dynamic portrayals of everyday working-class people and rural landscapes in the American Midwest and South. 

Born on April 15, 1889, in Neosho, Missouri, Benton hailed from an influential political family (he was named after his great-uncle, the prominent U.S. Senator Thomas Hart Benton). While his father pushed him toward a career in law and politics, his mother supported his artistic ambitions. He began his career as a newspaper cartoonist in Joplin, Missouri, before studying at the Art Institute of Chicago and spending three years in Paris absorbing modernist techniques. 

By the 1920s, Benton had settled in New York City, where he spent over two decades teaching at the Art Students League (most notably mentoring Jackson Pollock). After the death of his father in 1924, Benton reconnected with his Midwestern roots and began taking sketching trips across rural America, capturing the lives of farmers, miners, and laborers.