Missouri is Not a Houn' Dog State

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Missouri is Not a Houn' Dog State
Was Thomas Hart Benton's mural a great work of populist art or a painted slap in Missouri's face? Decide for yourself at the state capitol in Jefferson City.

By Martin Northway


	Benton's famous mural caused as much criticism as praise—a true sign of the painting's long-lasting impact.

As artist Thomas Hart Benton knew well, Missouri makes quite a painting—from its craggy Ozarks to its rolling prairies, from its lakes and southeastern bayous to the broad, brown Mississippi on its border, and the Missouri meandering across its center. Jefferson City, the capital, is in the middle, perched on a bluff overlooking the Missouri. Just below are the rails of the historic Missouri Pacific Railroad and the dock at Jefferson Landing, where flatboats and steamboats once tied up. Before the Civil War, this was the edge of Little Dixie, home to slaveholders.

Explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark paddled up this way in 1804 on their journey through the Louisiana Purchase. Frontiersman Daniel Boone followed in 1811 on a six-month hunt, and his sons established a salt lick upstream. Then came settlers, statehood, steamboats, railroads, and people heading west.


	By summer 1936, the diminutive Benton was scrambling across scaffolding, painting his mural with bright, hand-mixed egg tempera.

And they still come. Thousands of visitors travel to Jefferson City each year to see a remarkable mural documenting Missouri's colorful story, and they've been coming to see it for over six decades. Capitol Museum Director John Cunning estimates 65,500 people viewed it last year. They come, he says, not because the mural tells the stories of "great men" but because it deals with "common people." Its simple genius, he suggests, is that the folks who populate the mural are "doing the sort of things any one of us might imagine doing in our everyday lives."

The mural's story began in the Great Depression. Native son Thomas Hart Benton, born in Neosho in 1889 and trained at the Art Institute of Chicago and in Europe, was one of America's best-known Regionalist painters. In 1935 he accepted a $16,000 commission from the state legislature to paint a mural, "A Social History of Missouri," in the House Lounge of the state capitol.

Benton's own family had a prominent place in Missouri's history. His granduncle, whose name he shared, was a legendary U.S. senator credited with ushering Missouri to statehood. His father, Maecenus E. Benton, was a four-term U.S. congressman from the southwestern part of the state. But the artist's vision was of the everyday people who had driven roiling change. "I wasn't so much interested in famous characters," he wrote later, "as I was in the ordinary run of Missourians I had known in my youth."

For 18 months, he carefully planned the mural and sketched models for the people and animals that would appear in it. "I traveled all over the state," he wrote in his autobiography. "I played the harmonica and wore a pink shirt to country dances. I went on hunting and fishing parties. I attended an uproarious three-day, old-settler's drunk, in the depths of the Ozarks."

Like Italian painter Tintoretto and Spaniard El Greco, he sculpted miniature clay figures so he could achieve proper depth and proportion for his broad-brush Missouri landscape. By summer 1936, the diminutive Benton was scrambling across scaffolding, painting his mural with bright, hand-mixed egg tempera. It was an unusually hot summer, and the smell of sulfur from the eggs filled the room.

He painted his mural on three walls of the 25-by-55-foot room. (The fourth was taken up with large windows, and Benton put power lines and corn stalks in the narrow strips between them.) His visual narrative began with exploration and settlement and depicted a political meeting, the Civil War, farming, and a courtroom, ending with industrial development and the cities of St. Louis and Kansas City.

The unifying background is a rolling landscape with a river. Against this backdrop Benton painted 235 people modeled from life. He also depicted dogs, mules, hogs, and chickens. The vividly brushed people almost come to life there on the walls. Large foreground figures break the boundaries of panels and seem "able to move, in a rather disconcerting fashion, from one form of pictorial reality into another," biographer and critic Henry Adams observes. The work is confrontational: Civil War soldiers and guerrillas and a wartime lynching are set next to a barnyard scene, and the overall narrative is interrupted by panels showing Mark Twain's Huck Finn with slave Jim, the James-Younger gang robbing a bank and a train, and the jealous Frankie shooting her husband, Johnny, 'cause he done her wrong. A woman diapers a baby in the foreground of the political rally (whose stump speaker is inspired by Benton's father). In a Kansas City scene, powerful, corrupt political boss Tom Pendergast figures prominently.

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Martin Northway, a Chicago-based freelance writer, majored in American History at the University of Chicago. Raised in Missouri, he has deep roots there and is working on an anecdotal social history of the state.

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