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
**Sumter** arrives with the weight of a nation holding its breath. As one of Curry's fourteen oil paintings created to illustrate Stephen Vincent Benét's Civil War epic *John Brown's Body*, it takes as its subject the moment that cracked America in two — the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter in April 1861. The nation splits as tensions boil over, leading to the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter — and Curry renders that rupture with the full muscle of his Regionalist hand. Where his Kansas murals trafficked in prairie scale and biblical fury, here the drama is coastal and cataclysmic: smoke, siege, and the cold geometry of a harbor fortress under fire. His palette likely moves through sulfurous yellows and military grays, the kind of earthy, unflinching color sense shaped by the Rubens reproductions of his Kansas childhood, now turned toward the founding trauma of the republic.
The illustrations — oil paintings reproduced in offset lithography by Fretz Frères of Zurich — were Curry's last for a book, and the Limited Editions Club edition was issued unsigned, as the artist died before its publication.
The completion of this series of paintings illustrating Benét's poem was likely the impetus for the entire Limited Editions Club project; publisher George Macy is believed to have commissioned the illustrations when the controversy over Curry's John Brown mural at the Kansas State Capitol was fresh.
*John Brown's Body* is an epic poem that explores the themes of abolitionism, war, and the moral complexities surrounding the American Civil War — and Curry, who had spent his career painting John Brown as a near-mythological figure of violence and prophecy, was the ideal artist to bring its scenes to life. *Sumter* sits near the hinge of the poem's narrative, the moment abstract conflict becomes real war.
On the wall, this print belongs in a room that takes American history seriously — a study lined with maps and books, a hallway with dark-stained wood, a reading room where the light comes in low and amber in the late afternoon. It speaks to the viewer who finds beauty in historical gravity, who wants art that has witnessed something. Curry's illustrative work for *John Brown's Body* is less well known than his monumental murals, which makes *Sumter* a genuinely rare encounter: a masterwork from a painter at the end of his life, distilling a nation's defining catastrophe into the intimate frame of a single painted scene.