This biography from the Archives of AskART:
| From New Hampshire, James Gilchrist Benton was an army officer stationed in San Antonio, Texas where he sketched the Spanish missions, battlefields of the Texas Revolution and other Texas subjects.
Using these sketches, New Orleans painter Charles Smith did a series of paintings on 10,000 square feet of canvas and 300 feet long titled the "Moving Panorama of Texas and California". Called a newsreel, it was first shown in New Orleans in 1842 and then in towns along the Mississippi River.
Source:
John and Deborah Powers, "Painters, Sculptors, and Graphic Artists" |
Biography from Amon Carter Museum of American Art:
| During the Mexican/American War, James Benton was posted to San Antonio at the war’s end to serve as inspector of arsenals at the ordnance depot there. He was a graduate of West Point and a specialist in the design and testing of small-scale artillery equipment, Benton was also trained as a topographical draftsman. He applied his drawing skills to recording the scenery in and around San Antonio during the three years he was stationed there. He was a sensitive observer and possessed an artist’s eye, for his drawings are more than just reportorial vignettes: they are poetic studies of the romance of San Antonio evoked by its old Spanish architecture and its mix of ethnically diverse people.
He did numerous sketches of Texas views produced in collaboration with a New Orleans artist, Charles L. Smith. The resulting panorama was exhibited in New Orleans in 1852. It was described as featuring views of the missions around San Antonio, views perhaps derived from Benton’s drawings. The unwieldy panorama painting did not survive, so the precise role that Benton’s drawings played in its conception are unknown, but the variety of images that he produced of people and places in San Antonio would have been essential to lending accurate details and local color to any scene.
Benton left San Antonio in 1852, but his duties as arsenal inspector took him to places throughout the American South, and he continued to make drawings of the people and picturesque sites he encountered. |
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