Thomas Hart Benton Home and Studio State Historic Site

The Thomas Hart Benton Home and Studio State Historic Site at 3616 Belleview Avenue in Kansas City’s Roanoke neighborhood is the house and carriage-house studio where the Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton lived and worked for nearly four decades, and where he died in 1975. The studio is preserved essentially as he left it, making the site an unusually intimate record of a major American artist at work.

[!info] Cornerstone-adjacent entry Created out of the deep-dive on Thomas Hart Benton. Citation-first; sourced to named references with links.

The house and studio

The Bentons made their home in a 1903 limestone-and-shingle house at 3616 Belleview in the Roanoke neighborhood, where the painter lived for nearly forty years until his death.¹² Benton converted half of the property’s carriage house into his art studio, and it is that studio — left with his coffee cans of brushes, his paints, and a stretched canvas still in place — that gives the site its power: it remains essentially as Benton left it on the day he died there in 1975.¹

As a historic site

The property is preserved as the Thomas Hart Benton Home and Studio State Historic Site, managed by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources / Missouri State Parks and furnished with the Bentons’ original belongings — one of Kansas City’s notable cultural landmarks and a rare in-situ artist’s studio open to the public.¹ For Benton’s life and his major Kansas City works, see Thomas Hart Benton.

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