Twentieth-Century Fox Film Corporation

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Printed with black and gray on cream-white paper, this horizontal lithograph shows nine people around or near a pickup truck to our right and a man sitting in front of a shed to our left under a moonlit sky. We are low to the ground, looking slightly up at the scene. Four men wearing hats load the back of the truck. The truck has a tractor-like cab with the windshield tilted out, lamp-like headlights, and the thin tires have spokes. A woman wearing a shin-length dress sits on the fender next to the door we can see, and she looks away toward the men to our left. A younger girl stands with arms crossed and young boy sits on the ground, both facing away from us, near the woman. Beyond the truck and to our left, an oil lamp sits on what might be a box or piece of furniture, next to a round basket. A person wearing a long garment, perhaps a coat, and a wide-brimmed hat faces away from us and seems to support a woman wearing a long dress, whose face turns up as she sways back. Another man sits next to an open door of the wooden shed to our left. A tree growing on the far side of the shed curves up over the sloping roof. A farmhouse sits on the horizon in the distance to our left. Two large, textured, sawn tree trunks lie on the ground close to us in the lower left corner. The land rises in low hills under the truck and shed. A crescent moon hangs in the dark sky above between two arms of clouds that sweep in from our right. On the paper under the printed image to the left, the artist inscribed the work: “To Patricia Syrett from Thomas H. Benton.” The artist also signed the work in the other lower corner, to the right: “Benton.”
Thomas Hart Benton, Twentieth-Century Fox Film Corporation, Departure of the Joads, 1939, lithograph on wove paper, Reba and Dave Williams Collection, Florian Carr Fund and Gift of the Print Research Foundation, 2008.115.14

Departure of the Joads

Thomas Hart Benton, Twentieth-Century Fox Film Corporation · 1939 · lithograph on wove paper ·  Accession ID  2008.115.14