Aaron

It was common for Benton to go out and find subjects for his art, but in the case of Aaron, the subject was brought to him. One of Benton’s students at the Kansas City Art Institute met the 82-year-old man depicted here along East 18th Street in Kansas City and persuaded him to model for the class. The deeply empathetic, sensitive treatment of this elderly man in both the original painting and this later lithograph stands in stark contrast to the more stereotyped images of African Americans from the period.