Sale 2507, Part I - Old Master Through Modern Prints, May 2, 2019

231 c THOMAS HART BENTON The Race . Lithograph, 1942. 225x337 mm; 8 7 / 8 x13 1 / 4 inches, full margins. Edition of 250. Signed in pencil, lower right. Published by Associated American Artists, New York. A superb, richly-inked impression of this important American lithograph. Based on the same-titled oil painting, now in a private American collection. Benton shows a lone horse racing a steam engine across a barren midwestern prairie. The telephone pole and line are the only other signs of human presence in this bygone scene. Fath 56. [15,000/20,000] 232  THOMAS HART BENTON Slow Train Through Arkansas . Lithograph, 1941. 255x326 mm; 10x12 3 / 4 inches, wide margins. Edition of 250. Signed in pencil, lower right. Published by Associated American Artists, New York. A superb impression with strong contrasts. Benton’s lithograph is based on an excerpt from Thomas W. Jackson’s 1903 collection of humorous stories, On a Slow Train through Arkansas (he also made a painting of this scene around the same time, which is now in the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville). Jackson’s story reads, “It was down in Arkansas I rode the slowest train I ever saw. It stopped at every house. When it came to a double house, it stopped twice. They made so many stops I said, ‘Conductor, what have we stopped for now?’ He said, ‘There are some cattle on the track.’ We ran a little ways further and stopped again. I said, ‘What is the matter now?’ He said, ‘We have caught up with those cattle again.’” Fath 46. [5,000/8,000] 231