Oil on beaverboard, 74.3 x 62.4 cm, Friends of American Art Collection,
1930.934
All rights reserved by The Art Institute of Chicago and VAGA, New York, NY
http://www.artic.edu/artaccess/AA_Modern/pages/MOD_5_lg.shtml
Seen in this 1942 photo, Nan Wood Graham, Grant
Wood's sister,
and Dr. B.H. McKeeby, the family dentist, served as the models for
American Gothic.
Photo: Cedar Rapids Museum of Art archives
Grant Wood (1891-1942)
adopted the precise realism of 15th-century northern European artists, but
his native Iowa provided the artist with his subject matter.
American Gothic
depicts a farmer and his spinster daughter posing before their house,
whose gabled window and tracery, in the American Gothic style, inspired
the painting's title.
In fact, the models were
the painter's sister and their dentist. Wood was accused of creating in
this work a satire on the intolerance and rigidity that the insular nature
of rural life can produce; he denied the accusation. American Gothic
is an image that epitomizes the Puritan ethic and virtues that he believed
dignified the Midwestern character.
Grant Wood came to Eldon
in the late 1920's with fellow artist and Eldon native, John Sharp. He was
inspired by the contrast of the modest little one and one half story frame
house with its (as he described it) "pretentious" Gothic style windows.
There is one in each gable end. He sketched the house on the back of an
envelope and used it as the backdrop in his world renowned 1930's painting
"American Gothic".
His sister, Nan, and his
dentist, Dr. B. H. McKeeby, posed as the sour faced couple. Wood intended
the couple to represent a typical small town resident and his daughter,
but most interpret them as man and wife. Through countless parodies, the
work has made the house one of the most recognized in the world.
With "American Gothic,"
Grant Wood tells the story of Midwestern life and culture through the use
of many traditional symbols: the rick-rack on the woman's apron, the
gothic window, the pitchfork held in the tight fist of the somber farmer.
At the annual juried
exhibition in Chicago, the piece won the Art Institute's $300 purchase
prize. And it propelled the artist's career from local to national
recognition. The painting, which glorified and satirized rural Americans,
remains in the running for the most parodied work of art.
The model for the
farmer's wife in the picture was Grant's sister, Nan Wood Graham. Her face
competes with Whistler's mother and the sitter for the Mona Lisa as the
most well-known female subjects in a painting.
Iowa native Grant Wood
is best known for his folksy depictions of mid-western farm life, such as
American Gothic (1930;Art Institute of Chicago), his famous depiction of
his sister Nan and his dentist posing as a farmer and his spinster
daughter. American Gothic received widespread public and critical
attention and thrust Wood overnight into the national spotlight.
In 1934 the artist was
hailed by Time magazine as the "chief philosopher" of Regionalism, the new
style of American realist painting that was also pursued by Kansan John
Steuart Curry and Missourian Thomas Hart Benton. Sentimental Ballad,
however, is somewhat atypical in Wood's career, for it relates to the
artist's less known commissions for Hollywood and corporate patrons.
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