February 19, 1922

Thomas Hart Benton married Rita Piacenza, an Italian immigrant and former student who managed all his business affairs so that he could focus on art. Benton—painter, muralist, and writer from Missouri—developed, along with artists Grant Wood and John Stewart Curry, a style of painting in the 1920s that became known as regionalism. Benton was influenced early in his career by a sketching trip he took through northwest Arkansas in 1926.