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
In *The Old Folks*, Curry turns his unflinching gaze toward the domestic interior, capturing two figures of advanced age in what appears to be a moment of quiet companionship. The title's directness—"Mother and Father"—signals a deeply personal subject, likely drawn from Curry's own family experience on the Kansas farm. The composition probably centers the pair in a sparse, rural American home, rendered in the rich, earthy palette and robust figural style that Curry inherited from his study of Rubens and Doré. There is dignity here, not sentimentality: these are working people, their bodies shaped by decades of labor, posed without flattery or melodrama. The paint handling carries weight and presence, making age itself—its texture, its reality—into the subject of serious artistic attention.
This work belongs to Curry's commitment to finding grandeur in American vernacular life. Having grown up among farmers and rural families, he rejected the European modernist impulse to abstraction in favor of celebrating the actual people and places of his native landscape. *The Old Folks* exemplifies this democratic vision: there is no hierarchy of subject matter in Curry's America. Parents deserve the same compositional care and formal sophistication as circus performers or historical heroes.
Hung in a living room or study, this print speaks quietly but insistently to viewers who recognize the beauty in aging, in ordinariness, in the faces of people who have lived. It asks us to look closely at what we might otherwise overlook—and to honor it.