John Steuart Curry was an American artist known for his involvement with Regionalist movement alongside Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton. Employing an illustrative realism, Curry portrayed events of the Great Depression as well as accounts of American history, as seen in his famed mural The Tragic Prelude (1938­–1940). “I have my own ideas about telling the story of pioneers coming into Kansas,” he once said. “I want to paint this war with nature and I want to paint the things I feel as a native Kansan.” Born on November 14, 1897 in Dunavant, KS, he went on attend both the Kansas City Art Institute and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Curry began his career in 1918 as an illustrator of magazines and later traveled to Europe where he admired the works of Jean-François Millet and Gustave Courbet. After returning to America, the artist traveled with the Ringling Brother Circus, taught in New York, and became an artist in residence at the University of Wisconsin. He was an active participant in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s WPA program and produced posters encouraging the war effort in the late 1930s. Curry died on August 29, 1946 in Madison, WI. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.