Achelous and Hercules

Achelous and Hercules is a large mural in oil and tempera on canvas mounted on plywood, painted in 1947 by the American regionalist Thomas Hart Benton and now held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington. It shows Hercules, dressed in blue jeans, wrestling the horns of a bull, the shape taken by the river god Achelous in their mythical contest, while Benton relocates the scene to a Midwestern American harvest populated with laborers, women representing fertility, a cornucopia of farm produce, and a paddle steamer on the river behind them. The painting was Benton's first mural commission since his Missouri State Capitol murals of the previous decade, and it doubled as his rejoinder to the rising abstract expressionist movement of the time, restating his own regionalist style through classical myth. Benton also used the ancient story of a river tamed to comment on real concerns in Kansas City in the 1940s over flood control and the management of its rivers. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/