AFA Autumn 2018

Autumn 122 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com Leroy Williams (1878–1965), Prisoners Taken at Bennington Battle, August 16, 1777, 1938. Oil on canvas, 72 x 144 inches. Bennington Museum Collection; Courtesy of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), Vermont Federal Art Project (FAP). Bennington Museum and Vermont’s Federal Art Project collaborated with artists to create large murals and smaller easel paintings documenting local history. The enormous mural depicting the aftermath of the Battle of Bennington in the Revolutionary War was one result of this collaboration. The subjects of the paintings were researched in great depth by both the artists and museum staff to ensure historical accuracy; this work was created in parallel with a Historical Records Survey project to create a comprehensive archive documenting every participant in the Battle of Bennington. Despite efforts to ensure their accuracy, these paintings created a picture of Vermont’s past skewed by popular prejudices and the state’s conservative leanings. In a letter to artist Leroy Williams, Bennington Museum director John Spargo wrote, “We want something that is much more in the tradition of [John] Trumbull’s work than in the tradition of the Mexican (whose name escapes me) who did the Rockefeller Center things.”  2 The “Mexican” whose name escaped Spargo was Diego Rivera, whose surreptitious inclusion of Lenin’s portrait in the Rockefeller Center mural created a national controversy in 1933. On the other hand, the eighteenth-century American painter John Trumbull was best known for his history paintings personifying America’s Yankee heritage. Spargo wanted a painting that carefully avoided any suggestion of Communist or liberal sympathies.