Grant Wood, US artist remembered for his realistic paintings portraying the architecture, landscape and people of 1930's Midwestern United States, was born on this date in 1891. 10 facts about him.
Grant Wood was born on a farm near the small town of Anamosa, Iowa. His parents were Hattie and Francis Wood.
He became an apprentice in a metal shop, and was a woodworker and a metalworker as well as a painter. He spent some time working as a teacher and during that time, put his practical skills to use by making a “naughty bench” for students to sit on while awaiting punishment from the principal.
Near the end of World War I, Wood joined the army, working as an artist designing camouflage scenes. Throughout his life, he’d supplement his income by designing advertisements and fliers.
He travelled to Europe several times to study different artists and styles of painting. Impressionism and post-Impressionism were among the styles he studied, but he was most influenced by the 15th-century Flemish artist Jan van Eyck.
His own style was part of a movement called American Regionalism, popular during the great depression, which favoured realistic scenes of everyday life in rural and small-town America, primarily in the Midwest.
His most famous painting, American Gothic, had as its inspiration a real house that he noticed while visiting Eldon, Iowa, to attend an art exhibition. He decided he wanted to paint the house and its arched window, and the kind of people he thought might live there, so made a sketch of it on an envelope. It was called the Dibble House, and years later when it began to fall into disrepair, Grant’s sister began a movement to preserve it. It is now a tourist attraction and visitors are encouraged to have their photos taken outside, posing as the couple in the painting.
The models for the couple in the painting were Byron McKeeby, who was actually Wood’s dentist, and Wood’s sister, Nan. He had wanted to use his mother as the model, but thought she might not be up to posing for long periods. Hattie did contribute by lending her apron and cameo for her daughter’s costume. The assumption was often made that they were a married couple, but Nan insisted they were supposed to be a farmer with his unmarried daughter. Perhaps she was unhappy at being seen as much older than she was, or objected to being “married off” to an older man. Wood himself was ambiguous on the matter.
He was going to paint a sequel featuring a Mission style bungalow and the people he thought might live in a house of that style. Which, he once said in an interview, would have been in a landscape format rather than a portrait one like American Gothic.
Wood was married to Sara Sherman Maxon for three years, although it’s commonly believed he was gay. Colleagues at the university he worked at tried to get him fired for being gay but the university administration dismissed the allegations.
Wood was a Freemason for a while. After receiving his third Degree of Master Mason in 1921 he painted a picture called The First Three Degrees of Freemasonry, but in 1924 he was suspended for not paying his membership fee and left the organisation completely.
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