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Accession #	38.79
Artist	Thomas Hart Benton
Title	Louisiana Rice Fields
Date	1928
Medium	Egg tempera and oil on Masonite
Dimensions	30 1/8 × 47 7/8 in. (76.5 × 121.6 cm) frame: 38 1/8 x 55 7/8 x 3 1/2 in. (96.8 x 141.9 x 8.9 cm)
Signed	Signed lower right: "Benton"
Credit Line	John B. Woodward Memorial Fund
Location	American Identities: Colony to Nation / Inventing American Landscape

Curatorial Remarks: Thomas Hart Benton focused on the broad appeal of the commonplace, as seen in this painting of laboring rice harvesters. He described American “types” rather than specific individuals and places, and rendered them in a directly expressive, almost caricatured manner. Benton, and his peers in the American Scene movement of painting that arose in the late 1920s, deliberately abandoned European-derived subjects and urban settings in favor of imagery drawn from the rural United States.