Cotton Pickers, Georgia
Benton painted Cotton Pickers, Georgia from studies that he made during a trip through Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia in the summer and fall of 1926. The artist returned to this same group of studies in conceiving and executing the America Today mural panel Deep South (1931). Activated by passages of frenetic brushwork and rich color, Cotton Pickers, Georgia retains much of the sketchy quality of Benton’s drawings, but it also exhibits the painter’s interest in rendering workers heroically. The artist recalled that his experience in the South "was the beginning of what came to be called my ‘Regionalism.’"
taken from The Met
John Singer Sargent
1909
