The two people in American Gothic are a farmer and his grown up daughter, as Grant Wood described them. The real sitters were his sister, Nan Wood Graham, and his dentist, Dr. Byron McKeeby.
Neither was a farmer, and the two never posed together. Wood painted the house, his sister and his dentist in separate sessions in 1930, then joined them on one canvas that now hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago.
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Daughter is the word Wood settled on, and the Art Institute still uses it: its label describes a farmer and his daughter. It was not the first word he used.
Nan had her reasons for wanting the matter settled. Beside her stood a man of 62, about twice her age, and she was often taken for his wife, which is said to have embarrassed her. The version that spared her is the one that lasted. It is not the only one Wood put on paper.
To see how it changed, start with the house, because the picture began there and the people came later.
Whose farmhouse is it, really?
It belonged to Catherine and Charles Dibble, who built it in 1881 and 1882 in Eldon, Iowa. Grant Wood saw it in the summer of 1930 and sketched his idea on the spot, then finished the painting in his studio in Cedar Rapids.
What caught him was the upstairs window, a lancet arch, the pointed shape of medieval Gothic churches, cut into a small wooden farmhouse. Wood found it pretentious for so humble a building.
Later investigation showed that the window is hinged and was a working part of the house, used to move furniture between the floors. The title borrows the name of that style, which the Art Institute calls Carpenter Gothic, so it names the house before it names anyone standing in front of it.
What You'll Discover
Where each sitter really posed.
What Wood called the woman in 1933.
Which historians still disagree.
What Iowa made of the picture.