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.
