John Steuart Curry

John Steuart Curry began his career in art as an illustrator for popular magazines. He came to prominence in 1928 with Baptism in Kansas his first painting to achieve critical acclaim; in 1930 it became the inaugural purchase of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Curry was one of the three central Regionalists, along with Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton. Wood encouraged Curry to return from the East coast to the Midwest and was instrumental in securing his artist-in-residency position at the University of Wisconsin in 1935. Curry’s work always spanned both the commercial and the fine art worlds. Many of his paintings were also reproduced as lithographic prints, and he employed the same subjects and techniques in both commercial illustrations and his art.