Grant Wood

Grant Wood was an Iowa painter who, after training in Europe, came home and made the rural Midwest his subject, one of the leaders of the style called Regionalism. In 1930 a friend drove him around the small town of Eldon, Iowa, and he saw a little white farmhouse with a pointed Gothic window in its upper wall. He imagined the kind of people who should live in it.

The couple in American Gothic are not husband and wife from the farm. The models were his sister, Nan Wood Graham, and the family's dentist, Byron McKeeby. The picture belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago, where it hangs in gallery 263, and it is the first stop on our Chicago walk. It is smaller than most people expect, so get close enough to see the stitching on the apron.