Thomas Hart Benton was born in Neosho, Missouri, in 1889. He was the son of a Missouri U.S. Congressman and the grandnephew of a U.S. Senator. It is not surprising that from such a background he would early develop an interest in American politics, history, folklore, and what might be called "common experience" -- concerns that invest all of his best-known paintings and that have identified him with the regionalist movement. Benton, however, did not care to be known as a regional painter, because he felt his work transcended the values of any one locale and that Americans, no matter what area of the country they inhabited, could relate to his message. Nonetheless, Benton's characteristic imagery is decidedly rural and midwestern. The Wreck of the Ole '97, for example, appears set in the gently rolling pastures and cornfields of the prairie heartland. Yet the theme was inspired by events that happened in the far distant and different terrain of Virginia. In 1903 a Southern Railway train, running out of control down a steep grade on the line between Lynchburg and Danville, jumped track, causing a spectacular accident in which thirteen people died. Romanticized accounts of the disaster soon came to be heard in the Blue Ridge high country, propounding the intense contest between man and powerful machine. Some variations suggested that the engineer, angered or bereft of love, deliberately sped to his death. At first the stories were continued by oral tradition. Then innumerable unknown authors reduced the narrative to verses for ballads that were sung to standard folk melodies. One of these lyrics, adapted to the tune of "The Ship that Never Returned" and now titled The Wreck of the Old Ninety-Seven, was recorded in 1923 by a nasal-voiced Virginia folksinger named Henry Witter, and again the following year by Vernon Dalhart, one of the most popular country recording stars of the period. That Benton drew upon this story is quite evident, but clearly he transported it to the territory he knew best.

The placement of objects and figures in Benton's scene is carefully composed so as to augment the sense of drama in the impending catastrophe. The system of diagonals on which the design is built leads the eye toward the center, emphasizing the instant of derailment and the potential danger for the approaching wagon and its riders. The long attenuated shapes of the cornstalks, clouds, and smoke add an eerie animation. As an optical rather than actual weight, the smoke moreover presses down ominously against the startled horse and driver.

Benton's earliest formal art instruction was at age eighteen at the Corcoran Gallery School in Washington, D.C. Later that same year, 1907, he also attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, but he disliked the heavy regimentation then of drawing from plaster casts. The next year he left for Paris to study at the Académie Julian. He remained there three years, all the while growing increasingly aware of postimpressionism, cubism, and other European contemporary art movements. His own work of this period followed in several of the prevailing modern tendencies. Unfortunately most of his early paintings were destroyed in a fire at his Neosho home in 1917.

In 1918 Benton was working as a draftsman at the Norfolk Naval Base. At about this time he rejected European and other modern influences, returning to realism and a more narrative style. Modernist principles hereafter would be applied only to the extent of his pictorial composition and to his expressive ends through purposeful distortion of form.

Benton settled in New York in 1923 to teach at the Art Students League. In 1935 he returned to his native Missouri to teach and direct the Kansas City Art Institute. He continued to reside in Kansas City until his death in 1975 at age eighty-five. Today Benton is probably best remembered for his important large mural commissions at the New School for Social Research in New York (1930), the Missouri State Capitol in Jefferson City (1936), the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence, Missouri (1959-62), and the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville (1975).