From Benton to Degas: 7 artist homes you can visit
Works of art such as the sculpture of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., and the depiction of an American farmer and his daughter by Grant Wood in his painting “American Gothic,†are the works of classic American artists whose creations are well-known throughout the world.Ìýâ¡ÌýOverlooked is the space where their celebrated works of art were created, yet many of America’s most famous artists’ residences are open for public tours. Visiting where their art was first imagined and then created adds a layer of interest to their work.Ìýâ¡ÌýExamples of a few of the homes and studios of some of our late, great artists that welcome the public are below. Many provide hints of what inspired the creativity that appeared inside the walls of the art studio.
Story by Jim Winnerman, Special to the Post-DispatchÌý
Daniel Chester French
Daniel Chester French
1850-1931 • Stockbridge, Mass.
It was neighbor May Alcott, the sister of author Louisa May Alcott, who gave 18-year-old Daniel Chester French some modeling clay and sculpting supplies after learning of the success he was having whittling figures in wood, and even turnips. No one would have imagined the young man who had recently returned to the family farm before completing an unsuccessful freshman year at MIT was beginning a career that would lead to his monumental sculpture of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
French lived and worked every summer from 1898 until 1931 in his studio at Chesterwood, his 122-acre Massachusetts estate. Still in the studio is the original 1/7-scale replica for the Lincoln Memorial. So is the railroad track built into the floor, which allowed French to move his massive sculptures outside so he could see how they looked on sunny and cloudy days, and against a backdrop of grass and trees.
Little-known fact • French sculpted the 19-foot statue of Lincoln out of 28 blocks of Georgia marble and used actual casts of Lincoln’s hands and face as reference.
More info •Ìý
Studio of the sculptor Daniel Chester French
- JUSTIN POPE
Sculpture models are seen in the studio of the late sculptor Daniel Chester French, Monday,Sept. 8, 2003 in Stockbridge, Mass. French, whose statues grace cities across the nation and is best known for his statue of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, spent many years creating at this 120-acre country estate and studio known as Chesterwood. (AP Photo/Justin Pope)
Sculptor Daniel Chester French
- Library of Congress
Sculptor Daniel Chester French
Winslow Homer
- Clarke Canfield
Winslow Homer
1836-1910 • Prouts Neck, Maine
Before settling into the home where he captured the fury of a wave and the power of nature in his paintings, Winslow Homer’s paintings of Americans at leisure along the Eastern Seaboard had been selling well. Yet, as he turned 40 Homer became fascinated by the travails of fisherman he observed first during a summer in Gloucester Harbor, Maine, in 1879, and then for 18 months spent in the seaside village of Cullercoats, England.
Returning to the United States in 1882, he immediately closed the New York apartment where he had lived and painted for 20 years, moving into a carriage house on investment property owned by his family in the seaside village of Prouts Neck, Maine. The 1,500-square-foot, stand-alone building perched on the rocky coastline offered a panoramic view of the Atlantic Ocean.
Homer added a long balcony on the second floor facing the coast, and had the structure moved closer to the shore. Downstairs has been described more as a “sportsman’s camp for short vacations†than a home, but the ruggedness agreed with Homer and perhaps even inspired his work. He remained there the rest of his life, and died in the studio in 1910.
Little-known fact • Homer was known as the “hermit of Prouts Neck.†To discourage visitors to his studio, he placed a sign in his yard warning “Snakes, Mice!†and another that read “Mr. Homer is not at home.â€
More info •Ìý
Ìý(AP Photo/Clarke Canfield)
Winslow Homer Studio
- Clarke Canfield
A back window in painter Winslow Homer's studio gives a view of the ocean that he depicted in his best-known paintings, in Scarborough, Maine. (AP Photo/Clarke Canfield)
Winslow Homer Studio
- Clarke Canfield
An interior room of painter Winslow Homer's studio in Scarborough, Maine. (AP Photo/Clarke Canfield)
Artist Winslow Homer
Artist Winslow Homer
Thomas Hart Benton
Thomas Hart Benton
1889-1975 • Kansas City
Although the art of Neosho, Mo., native Thomas Hart Benton is often associated with the Midwestern United States, he studied in Paris, lived 20 years in New York and summered for 50 years on Martha’s Vineyard. However, between 1935 and his death in 1975, Benton maintained a permanent home in Kansas City, painting in a stable he had converted into his studio.
When he returned to Missouri in 1935, he was becoming a leader of the Regionalist movement in painting, an art style depicting realistic scenes of rural and small-town America.
In 1936 Benton was awarded a commission for the mural in the Missouri state Capitol, “A Social History of Missouri.†Benton remarked in a 1973 interview that it was perhaps the best of his paintings.
Benton’s paints, cans of brushes and a stretched canvas remain where they were when he died in his studio after having just put the finishing touches on his last mural, “The Sources of Country Music,†for the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, Tenn.
A tour through the home reveals Benton was also a sculptor, writer, book illustrator and harmonica player who even recorded an album for Decca Records in 1942 titled “Saturday Night at Tom Benton’s.â€
Little-known fact • Benton was also an art teacher who counted abstract artist Jackson Pollock as one of his students.
More info •Ìý
Photo by Missouri State Parks
Thomas Hart Benton home and studio
- Missouri State Parks
Thomas Hart Benton's life is present in both his home and his paintings, and both are preserved at Thomas Hart Benton Home and Studio State Historic Site in Kansas City. photo by Missouri State Parks
Artist Thomas Hart Benton
- N/A
Artist Thomas Hart Benton
Edgar Degas
Edgar Degas
1834-1917 • New Orleans
While not an iconic American artist, Degas has a strong American family connection as his mother was from a prominent New Orleans family. It is not widely known outside of New Orleans that the acclaimed French Impressionist lived in the town for five months beginning in the fall of 1872. Today the 1852-era home and the bedroom studio where he stayed, and in which he completed 18 paintings, is open for tours.
Degas was the only French Impressionist to ever come to America, and his sojourn had a dual purpose. He arrived at age 38 to visit his extensive network of relatives, and to consider what direction he wanted to pursue with his already well-established art career.
The respite worked, as much of the work for which he is best known, such as his dancers, bathers and racehorses came upon his return to Europe.
“This is where he transformed into a “less complicated, and more spontaneous artist,†says great grandniece Joan Prados, who still resides in New Orleans. “The change in his approach to art is documented in his letters from New Orleans.â€
Little-known fact •ÌýPrados and two other of Degas’ great grandnieces, Marie Moyer and Margot Armstrong, give tours of the home and studio, which is the only Degas studio open to the public anywhere in the world.
More info •Ìý
Artist Edgar Degas
Artist Edgar Degas
Georgia O'Keeffe
- Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
Georgia O’Keeffe
1887-1986 • Ghost Ranch, Abiquiu, N.M.
Early in her career, O’Keeffe felt success as an artist would never materialize. She took a job as a commercial artist and did not paint between 1908 and 1912. Then, after being exposed to an innovative method of painting that was more fluid and free-form than what she was used to, O’Keeffe returned to her art with a fresh approach and an open mind. By the mid-1920s her work was being displayed and sold in New York City.
By 1929, O’Keeffe felt a need to find yet another source of inspiration for her work, so she traveled to New Mexico where she discovered the rugged beauty and the vivid colors of the Southwest. She also happened upon Ghost Ranch, which was an isolated dude ranch in the middle of the scenery she found so appealing.
Between 1929 and 1949, O’Keeffe spent part of nearly every year at Ghost Ranch, exploring the desert and capturing the landscape on canvas. In 1940 she purchased a home and seven acres at the ranch, and in 1945 purchased a crumbling adobe home in the nearby village of Abiquiu that she renovated into her studio and permanent residence.
Today visitors can visit the ranch and her home, and those familiar with her art can identify many of the scenes she painted.
Little-known fact • The image of a cow skull that is the Ghost Ranch logo originated from a drawing O’Keeffe did the first time she visited.
More info •Ìý
View from the bedroom of Georgia O'Keeffe's home in Abiquiu, New Mexico. Courtesy Georgia O'Keeffe Museum
Artist Georgia O'Keeffe
- AP
Georgia O'Keeffe stands next to her original oil paintings during a press review on Oct. 8, 1970 of her 121 paintings, watercolors, and drawings on exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. (AP Photo/stf)
Grant Wood
- MARK TADE
Grant Wood
1891-1942 • Cedar Rapids, Iowa
It was 1930 when Regionalist painter Grant Wood finished his painting “American Gothic,†the now immediately recognizable image of an American farmer and his daughter. But Wood was not standing at an easel while the rural couple posed in front of their home with the Gothic arched window in the background and a pitchfork between them. Instead he was working and living in a 975-square-foot apartment above a carriage house he shared with his mother and sister in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, from 1924 until 1935.
The late 19th-century carriage house had been built alongside an elegant mansion that once had housed one of Cedar Rapids’ most prominent families. But when Wood was there the space below his residence and studio was a garage for a mortuary operating out of the grandiose home.
The apartment had been offered to Wood rent-free in 1924 by businessman John B. Turner and his son David Turner who had become patrons of Wood’s art and had contributed to Wood’s sojourns to Europe in 1924 and 1928 to study painting.
Wood left the studio in 1935, but the apartment continued to be rented until 2000. In 2004 the Grant Wood Studio & Visitor Center opened to the public.
Little-known fact • John Turner II (son of David Turner) and his wife donated 84 works by Grant Wood to the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, which is home to more than 200 paintings by Wood and the largest collection of his work.
More info •Ìý
ÌýPhoto courtesy of the the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art
Artist Grant Wood
- Associated Press
Artist Grant Wood completing painting "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" in his Cedar Rapids, Iowa, studio on March 31, 1931. (AP Photo)
Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner
- Frank Eltman
I
Jackson Pollock
and Lee Krasner
1912-1956 (Pollock); 1908-1984 (Krasner) • Springs, N.Y.
This innovative American duo of early abstract artists were still in their formative years when they married in 1945. Although Pollock was already acknowledged as a leader in the developing new art form where he was working in New York, the couple moved to the rural hamlet of Springs, N.Y., to escape the pressure of the city and his burgeoning art career. The 1879 home with a barn they purchased with money lent by New York gallery owner Peggy Guggenheim was to become Pollock’s studio until his death in 1954.
In the late 1930s Pollock had begun experimenting with his unorthodox technique of spontaneously pouring and flinging the liquid paint on a canvas on the floor as he circled the emerging art, and the barn floor provided the open space he needed.
Meanwhile, Krasner continued to paint in an upstairs bedroom of the home but helped promote Pollock’s career over her own. After Pollock’s death, Krasner moved into the barn studio to paint, and she revitalized her own contemporary art career. Shortly after her death in 1984, a retrospective show of her art opened at the New York Museum of Modern Art.
A tour of the home and studio includes the opportunity for guests to wear protective slippers and walk on the floor where Pollock worked, the brilliant colors that overlapped the canvas onto the floor still visible.
Little-known fact • Jackson Pollock is buried behind the home in Springs, while Krasner is buried in front of the home.
More info •Ìý
(AP Photo/Frank Eltman)
The Jackson Pollock studio
- John Griffin/Stony Brook Univers
The Pollock-Krasner studio contains photographs and text panels about both artists' lives and careers. The walls are covered in Krasner's exuberant paint spatters, from 1957-1984. On the floor, the colors and gestures from Pollock's 1946-1952 masterpieces are clearly visible.
Artist Jackson Pollock
- AP
Artist Jackson Pollock
For more information
- Missouri State Parks
FOR MORE INFORMATION
The Historic Artists’ Homes and Studios program is a coalition of more than 30 American museums that were the homes and working studios of American artists and which are open for tours.Ìý
This site features photos of famous artists from around the world at work in their studios:Ìý
Photo of Thomas Hart Benton's studio. Photo by Missouri State Parks
Daniel Chester French
Daniel Chester French
1850-1931 • Stockbridge, Mass.
It was neighbor May Alcott, the sister of author Louisa May Alcott, who gave 18-year-old Daniel Chester French some modeling clay and sculpting supplies after learning of the success he was having whittling figures in wood, and even turnips. No one would have imagined the young man who had recently returned to the family farm before completing an unsuccessful freshman year at MIT was beginning a career that would lead to his monumental sculpture of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
French lived and worked every summer from 1898 until 1931 in his studio at Chesterwood, his 122-acre Massachusetts estate. Still in the studio is the original 1/7-scale replica for the Lincoln Memorial. So is the railroad track built into the floor, which allowed French to move his massive sculptures outside so he could see how they looked on sunny and cloudy days, and against a backdrop of grass and trees.
Little-known fact • French sculpted the 19-foot statue of Lincoln out of 28 blocks of Georgia marble and used actual casts of Lincoln’s hands and face as reference.
More info •Ìý
Studio of the sculptor Daniel Chester French
- JUSTIN POPE
Sculpture models are seen in the studio of the late sculptor Daniel Chester French, Monday,Sept. 8, 2003 in Stockbridge, Mass. French, whose statues grace cities across the nation and is best known for his statue of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, spent many years creating at this 120-acre country estate and studio known as Chesterwood. (AP Photo/Justin Pope)
Winslow Homer
- Clarke Canfield
Winslow Homer
1836-1910 • Prouts Neck, Maine
Before settling into the home where he captured the fury of a wave and the power of nature in his paintings, Winslow Homer’s paintings of Americans at leisure along the Eastern Seaboard had been selling well. Yet, as he turned 40 Homer became fascinated by the travails of fisherman he observed first during a summer in Gloucester Harbor, Maine, in 1879, and then for 18 months spent in the seaside village of Cullercoats, England.
Returning to the United States in 1882, he immediately closed the New York apartment where he had lived and painted for 20 years, moving into a carriage house on investment property owned by his family in the seaside village of Prouts Neck, Maine. The 1,500-square-foot, stand-alone building perched on the rocky coastline offered a panoramic view of the Atlantic Ocean.
Homer added a long balcony on the second floor facing the coast, and had the structure moved closer to the shore. Downstairs has been described more as a “sportsman’s camp for short vacations†than a home, but the ruggedness agreed with Homer and perhaps even inspired his work. He remained there the rest of his life, and died in the studio in 1910.
Little-known fact • Homer was known as the “hermit of Prouts Neck.†To discourage visitors to his studio, he placed a sign in his yard warning “Snakes, Mice!†and another that read “Mr. Homer is not at home.â€
More info •Ìý
Ìý(AP Photo/Clarke Canfield)
Thomas Hart Benton
Thomas Hart Benton
1889-1975 • Kansas City
Although the art of Neosho, Mo., native Thomas Hart Benton is often associated with the Midwestern United States, he studied in Paris, lived 20 years in New York and summered for 50 years on Martha’s Vineyard. However, between 1935 and his death in 1975, Benton maintained a permanent home in Kansas City, painting in a stable he had converted into his studio.
When he returned to Missouri in 1935, he was becoming a leader of the Regionalist movement in painting, an art style depicting realistic scenes of rural and small-town America.
In 1936 Benton was awarded a commission for the mural in the Missouri state Capitol, “A Social History of Missouri.†Benton remarked in a 1973 interview that it was perhaps the best of his paintings.
Benton’s paints, cans of brushes and a stretched canvas remain where they were when he died in his studio after having just put the finishing touches on his last mural, “The Sources of Country Music,†for the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, Tenn.
A tour through the home reveals Benton was also a sculptor, writer, book illustrator and harmonica player who even recorded an album for Decca Records in 1942 titled “Saturday Night at Tom Benton’s.â€
Little-known fact • Benton was also an art teacher who counted abstract artist Jackson Pollock as one of his students.
More info •Ìý
Photo by Missouri State Parks
Edgar Degas
Edgar Degas
1834-1917 • New Orleans
While not an iconic American artist, Degas has a strong American family connection as his mother was from a prominent New Orleans family. It is not widely known outside of New Orleans that the acclaimed French Impressionist lived in the town for five months beginning in the fall of 1872. Today the 1852-era home and the bedroom studio where he stayed, and in which he completed 18 paintings, is open for tours.
Degas was the only French Impressionist to ever come to America, and his sojourn had a dual purpose. He arrived at age 38 to visit his extensive network of relatives, and to consider what direction he wanted to pursue with his already well-established art career.
The respite worked, as much of the work for which he is best known, such as his dancers, bathers and racehorses came upon his return to Europe.
“This is where he transformed into a “less complicated, and more spontaneous artist,†says great grandniece Joan Prados, who still resides in New Orleans. “The change in his approach to art is documented in his letters from New Orleans.â€
Little-known fact •ÌýPrados and two other of Degas’ great grandnieces, Marie Moyer and Margot Armstrong, give tours of the home and studio, which is the only Degas studio open to the public anywhere in the world.
More info •Ìý
Georgia O'Keeffe
- Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
Georgia O’Keeffe
1887-1986 • Ghost Ranch, Abiquiu, N.M.
Early in her career, O’Keeffe felt success as an artist would never materialize. She took a job as a commercial artist and did not paint between 1908 and 1912. Then, after being exposed to an innovative method of painting that was more fluid and free-form than what she was used to, O’Keeffe returned to her art with a fresh approach and an open mind. By the mid-1920s her work was being displayed and sold in New York City.
By 1929, O’Keeffe felt a need to find yet another source of inspiration for her work, so she traveled to New Mexico where she discovered the rugged beauty and the vivid colors of the Southwest. She also happened upon Ghost Ranch, which was an isolated dude ranch in the middle of the scenery she found so appealing.
Between 1929 and 1949, O’Keeffe spent part of nearly every year at Ghost Ranch, exploring the desert and capturing the landscape on canvas. In 1940 she purchased a home and seven acres at the ranch, and in 1945 purchased a crumbling adobe home in the nearby village of Abiquiu that she renovated into her studio and permanent residence.
Today visitors can visit the ranch and her home, and those familiar with her art can identify many of the scenes she painted.
Little-known fact • The image of a cow skull that is the Ghost Ranch logo originated from a drawing O’Keeffe did the first time she visited.
More info •Ìý
View from the bedroom of Georgia O'Keeffe's home in Abiquiu, New Mexico. Courtesy Georgia O'Keeffe Museum
Grant Wood
- MARK TADE
Grant Wood
1891-1942 • Cedar Rapids, Iowa
It was 1930 when Regionalist painter Grant Wood finished his painting “American Gothic,†the now immediately recognizable image of an American farmer and his daughter. But Wood was not standing at an easel while the rural couple posed in front of their home with the Gothic arched window in the background and a pitchfork between them. Instead he was working and living in a 975-square-foot apartment above a carriage house he shared with his mother and sister in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, from 1924 until 1935.
The late 19th-century carriage house had been built alongside an elegant mansion that once had housed one of Cedar Rapids’ most prominent families. But when Wood was there the space below his residence and studio was a garage for a mortuary operating out of the grandiose home.
The apartment had been offered to Wood rent-free in 1924 by businessman John B. Turner and his son David Turner who had become patrons of Wood’s art and had contributed to Wood’s sojourns to Europe in 1924 and 1928 to study painting.
Wood left the studio in 1935, but the apartment continued to be rented until 2000. In 2004 the Grant Wood Studio & Visitor Center opened to the public.
Little-known fact • John Turner II (son of David Turner) and his wife donated 84 works by Grant Wood to the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, which is home to more than 200 paintings by Wood and the largest collection of his work.
More info •Ìý
ÌýPhoto courtesy of the the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art
Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner
- Frank Eltman
I
Jackson Pollock
and Lee Krasner
1912-1956 (Pollock); 1908-1984 (Krasner) • Springs, N.Y.
This innovative American duo of early abstract artists were still in their formative years when they married in 1945. Although Pollock was already acknowledged as a leader in the developing new art form where he was working in New York, the couple moved to the rural hamlet of Springs, N.Y., to escape the pressure of the city and his burgeoning art career. The 1879 home with a barn they purchased with money lent by New York gallery owner Peggy Guggenheim was to become Pollock’s studio until his death in 1954.
In the late 1930s Pollock had begun experimenting with his unorthodox technique of spontaneously pouring and flinging the liquid paint on a canvas on the floor as he circled the emerging art, and the barn floor provided the open space he needed.
Meanwhile, Krasner continued to paint in an upstairs bedroom of the home but helped promote Pollock’s career over her own. After Pollock’s death, Krasner moved into the barn studio to paint, and she revitalized her own contemporary art career. Shortly after her death in 1984, a retrospective show of her art opened at the New York Museum of Modern Art.
A tour of the home and studio includes the opportunity for guests to wear protective slippers and walk on the floor where Pollock worked, the brilliant colors that overlapped the canvas onto the floor still visible.
Little-known fact • Jackson Pollock is buried behind the home in Springs, while Krasner is buried in front of the home.
More info •Ìý
(AP Photo/Frank Eltman)
The Jackson Pollock studio
- John Griffin/Stony Brook Univers
The Pollock-Krasner studio contains photographs and text panels about both artists' lives and careers. The walls are covered in Krasner's exuberant paint spatters, from 1957-1984. On the floor, the colors and gestures from Pollock's 1946-1952 masterpieces are clearly visible.
For more information
- Missouri State Parks
FOR MORE INFORMATION
The Historic Artists’ Homes and Studios program is a coalition of more than 30 American museums that were the homes and working studios of American artists and which are open for tours.Ìý
This site features photos of famous artists from around the world at work in their studios:Ìý
Photo of Thomas Hart Benton's studio. Photo by Missouri State Parks
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Thomas Hart Benton mural depicting slavery was controversial when it was commissioned. It's a metaphor for today's contrived debates over teaching racial equity in the classroom.Ìý
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