page_title: Gerrit Beneker
section_title: Analysis
hierarchical_section_title: Gerrit Beneker / Analysis
caption_attribution_description: English: Standing portrait of George Trapp, a blue-collar worker, looking left; dressed in work clothes including a cap, white shirt, vest, and smock; holding the neck of a green glass carboy in left hand; to left, crates used to transport carboys, labeled VITRIOL; factory interior and tools of the trade visible in background. Gilded frame with label: "GEORGE TRAPP / OIL OF VITRIOL DEPT. / EMPLOYED 1881-1932". Oil of vitriol is a historic name for sulfuric acid. Sulfuric acid is used in industrial contexts to manufacture chemicals, fertilizers, and explosives. Artist Gerrit A. Beneker (1882-1934) was an American painter and illustrator, particularly known for his paintings of American industry in the 1920s. Otto Haas commissioned Beneker to paint a series of pictures showing Bridesburg employees.
context_page_description: Gerrit Albertus Beneker was an American painter and illustrator best known for his paintings of industrial scenes and for his poster work in World War I.
context_section_description: Beneker's output was prodigious, with some five hundred works in oil produced over a thirty-year period, exclusive of his many illustrations. 
  Most of his work consists of portraits, landscapes, and genre paintings of industrial and manual labor, and it is for the last that he is best known.
  Beneker's industrial paintings are optimistic and uplift the common laborer. James Guimond lists him, along with such other artists as Alfred Stieglitz, Joseph Stella, and Margaret Bourke-White, as a participant in "a popular genre of industrial art that was a kind of sooty romanticism." His industrial paintings toured the country, and Beneker was in great demand as a lecturer.
  While his portraiture and industrial works are conservatively realistic, his landscapes are noted for their impressionism.
  In addition, Beneker's illustrations appeared in over eighty publications including Scientific American and Harper's Weekly. He was noted for his Ivory Soap advertisements.
caption: Portrait of George Trapp, blue-collar worker, 1930
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