The Art Institute of ChicagoAmerican Gothic by Grant Wood is one of the best American Gothic paintings of all time.

Grant Wood's American Gothic is in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.The American Gothic House in Eldon, Iowa, was painted by Wood because he wanted people to live in that house.It depicts a farmer standing next to his daughter.The painting is named after the house.

The figures were modeled by Wood's sister and their dentist.The woman is dressed in a colonial apron and the man is wearing overalls and carrying a pitchfork.Wood's 1929 portrait of his mother, Woman with Plants, features two plants on the porch of the house.[4]

American Gothic is a popular image of 20th-century American art and has been parodied in American popular culture.The painting was displayed in Paris and London in its first showings outside the United States.It was 5, 6 and 7.

Grant Wood, an American painter with European training, was driven around Eldon, Iowa by a young local painter named John Sharp.The Dibble House is a small white house built in the Gothic architectural style.In 1973, Sharp's brother suggested that Wood sketched the house on the back of an envelope.Darrell Garwood wrote that Wood thought it was a form of pretentiousness to put a Gothic-style window in a flimsy frame house.[9]

Wood considered it "very paintable" and classified it as one of the "cardboardy frame houses on Iowa farms".After obtaining permission from the house's owners, Wood made a sketch the next day in oil paint on paperboard.The sketch depicts a steeper roof and a longer window than the actual house, which adorned the final work.

The kind of people Wood wanted to live in the house was the reason he decided to paint it.He recruited his sister to be the model for the daughter, dressing her in a colonial print apron.The Wood family's dentist was the model for the father.Wood wrote a letter to a woman in 1941 that said the pair were not a husband and wife but a father and daughter."

Gothic architecture is associated with the vertical that is stress in the painting.The Gothic pointed-arch window of the house under the steeped roof, as well as the stitching on the man's overalls and shirt, echo the upright, three-pronged pitchfork.Wood did not add figures until he returned to his studio in Cedar Rapids.He wouldn't return to Eldon again, even though he requested a photograph of the home to complete his painting.[8]

The painting was entered in a competition.A museum patron persuaded the jury to award the painting a bronze medal and a $300 cash prize, despite the judge deeming it a "comic valentine".The painting is part of the Chicago museum's collection after the patron persuaded the Art Institute to buy it.The image was reproduced in newspapers in Chicago, New York, Boston, Kansas City, and Indianapolis.There was a backlash when the image appeared in the Cedar Rapids Gazette.The depiction of Iowans as "pinched, grim-faced, puritanical Bible-thumpers" enraged them.Wood said that he went to France to appreciate Iowa because he had not painted a caricature of them.Wood said in a 1941 letter that the people who resent the painting are those who feel that they themselves resemble the portrayal.[19]

The painting was thought to be a satire of rural small-town life by the art critics who had favorable opinions about it.It was seen as part of the trend towards more critical depictions of rural America in literature, such as the 1919 novel Winesburg, Ohio, Sinclair Lewis's 1920 Main Street, and the 1924 The Tattooed Countess.[2]

American Gothic was seen as a depiction of the American pioneer spirit when the Great Depression began.Wood renouncing his bohemian youth in Paris and grouping himself with populist Midwestern painters such as John Steuart Curry and Thomas Hart Benton, who revolted against the dominance of East Coast art circles.Wood was quoted as saying, "All the good ideas I've ever had came to me while I was milking a cow."According to American art historian Wanda M. Corn, Wood was not painting a modern couple, but rather one of the past, and that he was inspired by his family photo album.Wood posed the figures in a way that resembled photographs of Midwestern families that were taken before World War I.[20]