Haystack

Benton’s search for the “real America” found him rambling throughout the country, stopping along roadsides to sketch. Many of the people and places he encountered were immortalized by his lithographs, sometimes years after he originally encountered them. A decade after Benton made a drawing of anonymous men on a North Carolina farm as they pitched cut hay into a haystack, he returned to the image to create this print. Haystack is one of many lithographs by Benton that celebrate American productivity and honest labor.