Chapter 2 — Before the New Deal: The First Regionalists

Long before the New Deal, long before the WPA, long before the word Regionalism existed, artists were already painting the world around them with a clarity and honesty that defined their time.

They didn’t call it Regionalism.
They didn’t need a label.
They simply painted life as it was lived.

And nowhere is this more evident than in the Dutch Golden Age.

In the 1600s, Dutch painters created what we now call “genre scenes” — but that term is too small for what they were doing. These artists were documenting:

neighbors
families
taverns
markets
kitchens
farms
harbors
the rituals of daily life

They painted the butcher sharpening his knife, the mother pouring milk, the fisherman mending his net, the children playing in the street. These were not mythological scenes or aristocratic fantasies. They were snapshots of remembrance — the same instinct that drives Regionalism today.

They were painting their region.
Their people.
Their truth.

They were Regionalists centuries before the word existed.

When American artists in the 18th and 19th centuries painted:

frontier towns
farms
river life
small communities
the expanding landscape

…they were doing the same thing the Dutch had done.

Not inventing.
Not abstracting.
Not escaping.

Documenting.

Artists like George Caleb Bingham, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Eakins weren’t trying to create a movement. They were simply painting the world they lived in — the people they knew, the places they walked, the work they witnessed.

This instinct — to paint what is real, where it is real — is older than any art movement.
It is older than America.
It is older than the New Deal.

This is the truth that history books often skip:

Regionalism existed long before it was named.

Artists didn’t wait for a government program to tell them to paint their communities. They didn’t need a label to justify their subject matter. They didn’t need a movement to validate their instinct.

They painted:

because life mattered
because place mattered
because people mattered
because memory mattered

Regionalism was already alive — quietly, naturally, universally.

What ties the Dutch masters, early American realists, and later Regionalists together is not style, technique, or period.

It is instinct.

The instinct to:

observe
remember
document
honor
preserve

The instinct to say:

“This is who we are.
This is where we live.
This is what is real.”

Regionalism didn’t begin in the 1930s.
It began the moment an artist looked at their own community and decided it was worth painting.