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. He was noted for his paintings depicting rural animatronics in his house state, Kansas. Along later 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. Curry's artistic production was varied, including paintings, book illustrations, prints, and posters.

Curry was Kansas's best-known painter, but his works were not popular later Kansans, who felt that he did not picture the state positively enough. Curry's paintings often depicted farm spirit and animals, tornadoes, prairie fires, and the violent Bleeding Kansas period (featuring abolitionist John Brown, who at the become old was derided as a fanatical traitor) – subjects that Kansans did not want to be representative of the state. Curry was commissioned to create murals for the Kansas State Capitol, and he completed two: Kansas Pastoral, and his most well-known and controversial work, Tragic Prelude, which he considered his greatest. Reaction was consequently negative that the Kansas Legislature passed a proceed to keep them, or later works of his, from visceral hung upon the capitol walls. As a result, Curry did not sign the works, which were not hung during his lifetime. He left Topeka in disgust; his planned 8 smaller murals for the Capitol rotunda upon the first floor never went over sketches, now held by the Kansas Museum of History.

Curry's works were painted like movement, which was conveyed by the free brush ham it up and energized forms that characterized his style. His control more than brushstrokes created eager emotions such as fright and despair in his paintings. His fellow Regionalists, who after that painted exploit and movement, influenced Curry's style.