About John Steuart Curry
John Steuart Curry (November 14, 1897 – August 29, 1946) was an American painter whose career spanned the years from 1924 until his death.
Along with Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, he was hailed as one of the three great painters of American Regionalism of the first half of the twentieth century. Born and raised on a farm in Dunavant, Kansas, Curry drew the raw material of his life's work from the very soil beneath his feet. His childhood home was filled with many reproductions of Peter Paul Rubens and Gustave Doré, and these artists' styles played a significant role in crafting Curry's own style. He trained at the Kansas City Art Institute and the Art Institute of Chicago before working as a magazine illustrator, and then traveled to Paris in 1926 where he studied for a year with Russian academician Basil Schoukhaieff.
His artistic production was varied, including paintings, book illustrations, prints, and posters.
With Benton and Wood, Curry led the movement to create and celebrate what he felt was an indigenous and democratic American art — Regionalism — in a reaction against European modernist trends.
His first major painting, *Baptism in Kansas*, was greeted with critical acclaim when exhibited at the 1928 Corcoran Gallery of Art biennial. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney took notice, provided Curry with financial support for the next two years, and later purchased *Baptism* for her newly established museum.
Among his best known works are *Baptism in Kansas* (1928), *Hogs Killing a Rattlesnake* (1930), and a series of paintings on circus life that he executed after touring with the Ringling Brothers in 1932.
He completed *Justice Defeating Mob Violence* for the Department of Justice Building in Washington, D.C., one of two murals he painted as a Works Progress Administration (WPA) artist. For the Topeka State House in Kansas, Curry completed one of his most powerful and controversial images: a Moses-like representation of abolitionist John Brown in a mural titled *Tragic Prelude*.
In 1936, Curry became the first artist-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin. The position permitted him a great deal of freedom, and he
About this work
John Steuart Curry's *Hogs Killing a Snake* captures a moment of raw, primal drama unfolding in the barnyard—the kind of violent encounter that would have been commonplace on his native Kansas farm. A knot of muscular hogs converges on a rattlesnake, their bodies tensed and twisted in a writhing mass of flesh and instinct. Curry renders the scene with the muscular, baroque energy he inherited from studying Rubens and Doré: every animal strains with baroque vigor, the composition roils with diagonal thrusts, and the palette pulses with earthy ochres, deep browns, and flashes of metallic light. This is no pastoral idyll—it is life asserting itself against threat, survival rendered as choreography.
The painting exemplifies Curry's core mission as a Regionalist: to dignify the ordinary brutality and drama of American agricultural life. Where European modernism looked toward abstraction and artifice, Curry looked down at the mud and manure of his own childhood, finding there subjects worthy of grand artistic treatment. Exhibited in 1930, *Hogs Killing a Snake* announced that the farm itself—with all its violence and vigor—was fit canvas for serious art. It ranks among his most iconic works precisely because it refuses sentimentality.
Hung in a room with good natural light, the painting commands attention without shouting. It speaks to anyone drawn to unflinching depictions of nature's force: farmers who recognize the scene, art lovers who admire Curry's sculptural brushwork, and viewers seeking something more substantial than decoration—a work that insists the American vernacular contains genuine epic power.