American Gothic is Grant Wood's 1930 painting of a stern man with a pitchfork beside a woman, in front of a white house in Iowa. Wood said it honored small-town Midwesterners. Many viewers saw a joke at their expense, and Wood is quoted as allowing some satire in it. The Art Institute of Chicago, which owns it, records both readings. The title comes from the pointed window above them.
The painting won a bronze medal and $300 at the Art Institute's annual exhibition in 1930, and the museum bought it that November.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (1,000+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
Wood meant the pair as a farmer and his grown daughter, but no such farmer or daughter ever existed. On November 6, 1930, the Des Moines Register printed a large photograph of the painting under the caption "An Iowa Farmer and His Wife," which got even the relationship wrong.
The man was no farmer, the woman was no wife, and the two never stood side by side. Wood painted each of them at a separate sitting in his Cedar Rapids studio, then set them in front of a house he had known only from a sketch.
Wood had made a family out of people he knew, and the Iowans who saw their own faces in it did not feel flattered.
Who posed with the pitchfork?
A dentist. Byron McKeeby was Wood's own dentist in Cedar Rapids, a graduate of the University of Iowa's dental college, born in 1867 and in his early sixties when the picture was made. He died in 1950.
Wood did not paint him as himself. He called the two figures "tintypes from my old family album," the Art Institute records. Tintypes were the stiff, unsmiling portraits that nineteenth-century families kept in albums, but the family in this one was invented.
He had cast two people he knew in the parts of a farmer and his daughter. The daughter came from even closer to home.
What You'll Discover
Who posed as the daughter.
What Iowans saw in those faces.
What is written on the overalls.
Where Wood found that house.