John Steuart Curry

He was especially focused on people who were down-to-earth, plain spoken and who were self reliantly making a living through hard physical labor challenged by harsh weather. In many of his paintings, he showed his disdain for racial discrimination and hatred, something he believed was psychologically poisonous. He did many murals dealing with land settlement and these themes of racial justice, and his, reflecting these themes, murals are in the Capitol Building in Kansas, the University of Wisconsin, Department of the Interior, and Department of Justice in Washington D.C.

Curry was a descendant of many generations of farmers, whose American ancestors originally were from Scotland. Some of them immigrated to South Carolina, and later followed “the line of the frontier into the Mississippi Valley.”

The first born of five children, Curry said of his childhood: “I was raised on hard work and the shorter catechism—Up at four o’clock the year round, doing half a day’s work before we rode to town on horseback to our lessons.”

From a young age, he was constantly drawing, an activity encouraged by his mother, who arranged art lessons for him from age 12. She also gave him his first glimpse of the Old Master painters through reproductions of their work she had collected on her honeymoon.

Never of the studious nature, Curry quit the county high school in Winchester, Kansas and spent that summer as a railroad section-hand. His earnings provided him with enough money to buy a suit of clothes so that he could go to Kansas City and attend the Art Institute. A month later he moved to the Art Institute of Chicago, and remained there for two years, supporting himself by sweeping floors and acting as a bus-boy in the cafeteria. Upon America’s declaration of war, Curry went to training camp, only to be sent home when it was discovered that he was still under age. In 1918 he enrolled at Geneva College, played football for two seasons, and spent the following five years training to earn his money as an illustrator of “blood-and-thunder” scenes for a popular western story magazine. In this capacity, he worked for illustrator Harvey Dunn in New Jersey from 1919 to 1926. He married and then persuaded art patron Seward Prosser to loan him $1000. 00,, which he used for one year of study in Paris in 1927.

The year in Europe, which included study at the Academy Julian, reinforced his independent nature. He was much more impressed by the paintings of Rembrandt and Rubens than by the modernist American painters, many whom were adopting the ‘isms’ of abstract styles of French contemporary artists such as Pablo Picasso’s Cubism and Max Ernst’s Surrealism. Curry determined to paint American subjects without European models and to celebrate American patriotism and regional pride rather than lofty, remote ideals espoused by the academics.

He returned to America penniless, and settling in Westport, Connecticut, swore that he would turn out a worthwhile picture or give up painting entirely. There in 1928 from memory he painted his first picture that became famous, Baptism in Kansas. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney bought it for her museum and subsidized him for two years at $50 a week.

Baptism in Kansas was heralded nationally as work of a new American genre, but fellow Kansans were not impressed until much later when they realized the scope of his recognition. Purchased by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, one of his key benefactors, Baptism launched his career as a regionalist. In 1930, he had his first one-man exhibition, held at the Whitney Studio Club, and was received enthusiastically by critics.