American Gothic is one of the most recognized paintings in American art: a stern man holding a pitchfork, a woman beside him, and a small white house with a pointed Gothic window behind them. It is also an Iowa story, start to finish.
The Artist: Grant Wood
Grant Wood was born on a farm near Anamosa, Iowa in 1891 and spent much of his life in Cedar Rapids. He became a leading figure in Regionalism, a movement that painted rural Midwestern life seriously at a time when many American artists looked to Europe for subjects. Wood treated Iowa and its people as worth painting, and American Gothic is the clearest proof.
The House That Started It
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The painting began with a real building. While visiting the small town of Eldon in southeastern Iowa in 1930, Wood noticed a modest white farmhouse with an ornate Gothic-style window set into its upper gable. The mismatch of fancy architecture on a plain country home caught his eye, and he decided to paint the kind of people he imagined living there. That building, the Dibble House, still stands in Eldon. The American Gothic House Center lets visitors pose in front of it.
Who Are the Two People?
The pair are not a married couple, though people often assume it. Wood used two people close to him as models. The woman was his sister, Nan Wood Graham. The man with the pitchfork was Wood's dentist, Dr. Byron McKeeby. Wood said he intended them as a farmer and his daughter, not husband and wife.
From Iowa to the World
Wood entered the finished painting in a 1930 exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it won a $300 prize and drew immediate attention. The Art Institute still owns it. It has since become one of the most reproduced and parodied images in American art, copied on everything from advertisements to cartoons.
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For Iowa, the painting put the state's landscape and people on the wall of a major museum and into the country's visual shorthand.
See It for Yourself
You can stand in front of the actual house in Eldon, and you can see more of Grant Wood's work at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, which holds the largest collection of his paintings. For an image this famous, the Iowa roots run deep.
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