John Steuart Curry was born and raised on his family farm in northeast Kansas, and though his life and career would take him to many different locales, his heart and indeed his work never left the land of his birth. Studying art originally at home as a boy in Kansas, and later in Kansas City, Chicago, and briefly in Paris, Curry’s enthusiasm for painting developed and grew in the 1910s and 20s. Working originally illustrating magazines and books, his “Baptism in Kansas,” painted in 1928 and purchased in 1931 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney gained him not only recognition but the funds to make a career in painting. By this time, he has settled in Connecticut and begun to continue painting in the “regionalist” style, depicting and glorifying images of the United States Midwest. In 1936, he was named the “artist in residence” at the University of Wisconsin, and continued to produce works and gain regional acclaim for the next decade. At the very end of his life the works of his and other Regionalist painters were beginning to recede into obscurity as Abstract and other modern forms of art rose to national prominence. Curry died of a heart attack in 1946, at the age of 49.