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
Curry's *Wisconsin Landscape* is a sweeping vista rendered in the bold, muscular style that made him a leader of American Regionalism. The composition likely unfolds across the canvas with the rolling terrain characteristic of the Upper Midwest—gentle hills, open fields, perhaps a distant tree line or farm structure anchoring the horizon. His palette, informed by Rubens's richness and Doré's dramatic contrasts, transforms ordinary farmland into something monumental. There is weight and presence here, not the delicate impressionism of European salon painting but the substantial, democratic beauty of working America. The viewer stands in the landscape itself, not observing from a cultured distance.
This work belongs squarely to Curry's mature period, created after 1936 when he took his position as artist-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin. By then, he had spent a decade celebrating Kansas soil, circus spectacle, and biblical-scale human drama—but Wisconsin offered him new terrain to interpret through his distinctive lens. Where Grant Wood found mystique in the geometries of the Midwest, and Benton pursued movement and narrative, Curry saw geological fact and human settlement as subjects worthy of the grandeur once reserved for European mythology.
On a wall, this print speaks quietly but with conviction. It belongs in a room with natural light, where its tonal subtlety can breathe—a study, a living room with large windows, anywhere the viewer needs grounding. It appeals to those who love landscape without sentimentality, who understand that American earth, honestly rendered, requires no embellishment. It is a landscape for the resident, not the tourist.