John Steuart Curry

Though John Steuart Curry left his family’s farm to pursue a career as a painter on the East Coast, he returned to his Midwestern roots as subjects for his art. Baptism in Kansas, his first major painting, portrays two fundamental elements the artist associated with his upbringing: the hardscrabble landscape of his native Kansas and the religious fervor of its inhabitants. (Curry proudly avowed that he was “raised on hard work and the Shorter Catechism.”) Based on a baptism Curry witnessed on a neighbor’s farm, the painting sets the ceremony around a cattle trough amid several farm buildings, with the stark prairie landscape receding into the background. At the scene’s center, surrounded by pious worshippers singing hymns, a young woman is about to be submerged into the water by an ashen-faced preacher. The image is filled with modern details, such as the line of Model-T cars and the cattle trough, a symbol of the deep-water drilling techniques that had made the state farmable. Yet the pair of birds hovering in an aureole of light over the scene—a raven and a dove, the birds Noah released after the Flood— suggests a divine, timeless significance in the survival of these hardy individuals amid their harsh environment.

When Baptism in Kansas was first shown in 1928, critics hailed it as a departure from the abstract language and urban themes employed by American modernists. Curry’s vision of an idealized American heartland signaled the emergence of Regionalism, a nationalistic, narrative style of painting that glorified rural, homespun values during the hardships of the Great Depression.