American Gothic

Two figures stand close together in the front of this painting, and a house rises behind them. The man is a farmer, and the woman beside him is his daughter. They are posed very stiffly, facing us, as if holding still for a camera. The painting is made with oil paint on Beaver Board, a kind of manufactured board, and it measures about 78 by 65 centimeters, a little over two and a half feet tall. It is a modest size, which draws you in close to the faces.

Grant Wood, an American artist who lived from 1891 to 1942, painted this work in 1930 in Cedar Rapids. He wanted the pair to look like people from an earlier time. In his words, they are like tintypes from his old family album. A tintype is an early kind of photograph, printed on a thin sheet of metal. The house behind them is built in a style called Carpenter Gothic, popular in the 1880s. Wood had seen a similar farmhouse while visiting Eldon, Iowa.

When the painting was shown at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1930, it became an instant sensation. Nobody could say for sure who these people were or what their story might be, and viewers loved guessing. Many took it as a joke at the expense of midwesterners who could not keep up with a modernizing world. Wood saw something else. He meant it as a positive picture of rural American values, a reassuring vision at the start of the Great Depression. Look once more at the two faces and decide which reading you believe.