The Beach Museum of Art holds numerous anatomy studies of humans and animals by Kansas Regionalist John Steuart Curry, including drawings of football players, dancers, and circus acrobats. This image served as an illustration for Emerson’s 1841 essay “Art” in a 1944 edition of the writer’s discourses. This illustration of a clay sculptor adding flesh to a skeletal figure appears in a chapter on art in a book of essays by American philosopher and lecturer Ralph Waldo Emerson. The leader of the transcendental movement wrote: “There is no statue like this living man, with his infinite advantage over all ideal sculpture, of perpetual variety.  … Here is the artist himself improvising, grim and glad, at his block. Now one thought strikes him, now another, and with each moment he alters the whole air, attitude and expression of his clay.”