The Homestead

The present work is a study for the artist's The Homestead (1938), a twenty foot long mural in the U.S. Department of the Interior Building, Washington, D.C. According to Henry Adams, "Curry's sole representation of real farm work is in his mural panel The Homestead, which shows fence posts being driven into the ground. Even here, however, he was less interested in recording how the chore is performed than in conveying the grandeur of the prairie setting." (as quoted in P. Junker, "Space, Weather, Myth, and Abstraction in the Art of John Stuart Curry", John Steuart Curry: Inventing the Middle West, New York, 1998, p. 115)