Thomas Hart Benton, born in Neosho, Missouri, came from an influential political family and was named for his great-uncle Thomas Hart Benton, one of Missouri’s first two United States senators. Supported by his mother in his artistic ambitions from an early age, he worked as a teenage cartoonist for the Joplin American, studied at the Art Institute of Chicago beginning in 1907, and continued his education in Paris at the Académie Julian in 1909. After returning to New York in 1913, he declared himself an enemy of modernism and began the naturalistic and representational work later known as Regionalism. His service in the U.S. Navy during World War I, where he was assigned to draw shipyard work and daily life at Norfolk, Virginia, strongly shaped his developing realistic style. In 1922, at age 33, he married Italian immigrant Rita Piacenza, one of his New York City art students; they had two children and remained married for nearly 53 years until his death in 1975, with Rita dying eleven weeks later. During a summer sketching trip in 1928, Benton painted Boomtown from a room in Borger’s Dilley Hotel on Main Street, and the original is now in the permanent collection of the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York. Benton portrayed Borger, Texas, as a place of black smoke, rough living conditions, expansive energy, and democratic hope, seeing in its oil-boom chaos not eastern industrial misery but a broad belief that people would share in the gifts of a mushroom town.