John Brown (Primary Title)
John Steuart Curry, American, 1897 - 1946 (Artist)
John Brown was an antislavery advocate best known for liberating enslaved people in Kansas in June 1858, and raiding an armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859, leading to five slave escapes and ten deaths among his own army. Brown was found guilty of treason and was executed by hanging later that year. John Steuart Curry produced this print in conjunction with a panel from his mural The Tragic Prelude (1937–42), in the Kansas State Capitol in Topeka. Modeling Brown after Michelangelo’s statue of Moses, Curry depicted a slave at lower left and tornado at upper left. The tornado symbolizes both the dust bowl and the social and economic upheaval of the late 1930s, as well as Brown himself, who was widely known as the “Cyclone of Kansas.”
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