Grant Wood

Grant Wood was an American painter best known for one of the most famous and most parodied pictures in the country's history. Born in Iowa in 1891, he became a leading figure of Regionalism, a movement that celebrated the rural American Midwest. His painting American Gothic, showing a stern farmer with a pitchfork beside a woman in front of a plain farmhouse, has become an icon endlessly copied and joked about.

He painted the rolling hills, tidy farms, and people of Iowa in a crisp, slightly stylized manner, with a hint of gentle humor. His work offered a homegrown alternative to the modern art coming out of Europe. Wood's affectionate, carefully crafted images of Midwestern life made him one of the defining American painters of the 1930s.