A product of the industrialized New South, Eugene Healan Thomason (1895-1972) made the obligatory pilgrimage to New York to advance his art education and launch his career. Thomason spent a decade in the city, adopting the Ashcan movement's gritty realistic aesthetic into a distinctive regionalist style. He returned to the South in the early 1930s, eventually settling in Nebo. For the next thirty years, he mined the rural landscape's rolling terrain and area residents for inspiration.