American Gothic
Grant Wood (1891 to 1942) · 1930
A stern farmer holds a pitchfork upright in front of a small white house with a pointed Gothic window, and beside him stands a woman in a rickrack trimmed apron, her eyes sliding sideways as if she has just noticed you. Grant Wood saw the house in Eldon, Iowa, in 1930 and imagined the kind of people who might live in it. He used his sister Nan as the woman and his dentist, Doctor Byron McKeeby, as the man, and he painted them separately. Wood said the pair were father and daughter, though most viewers have always read them as husband and wife.
Look at how the shapes repeat. The tines of the pitchfork are echoed in the stitching of the man's overalls, in the window tracery and even in the long faces. The paint is smooth and precise, closer to the Flemish masters that Wood had admired in Munich than to the loose brushwork of the Impressionists in the next building. The plants on the porch are a mother in law's tongue and a begonia, the cameo brooch at the woman's throat is carefully rendered, and a single stray curl escapes from her tight hair, a hint of a life that is not quite as buttoned up as it looks.
Wood entered the painting in the Art Institute's annual exhibition in 1930, where it won a bronze medal and was bought by the museum for three hundred dollars. Newspapers reproduced it across the country and Iowans complained that they had been mocked. Wood insisted it was a tribute. Over time the picture became the most parodied image in American art, standing in for the whole of the rural Midwest. A memorable detail is that the real house still stands in Eldon, and visitors go there to pose with a pitchfork in front of the window.
Did You Know? Wood's sister Nan, who posed for the woman, later said she had lengthened her face and flattened her hair for the picture and never quite forgave the joke.
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