Grant Wood

Grant Wood painted American Gothic in 1930 and spent the rest of his life attached to it. The couple in front of the Carpenter Gothic farmhouse were his sister Nan and his dentist, and Iowans complained at the time that he had made them look grim.

He studied in Munich, where fifteenth century Northern painting, Van Eyck and Memling especially, gave him the hard clean surfaces and precise detail he used afterwards. That European training sits oddly under the regionalist politics his work got attached to.

The landscapes are stranger than the famous picture suggests. Rolling Iowa hills rendered as smooth green mounds, trees like lollipops, everything tidied into pattern. He taught at the University of Iowa and died at fifty on the eve of his fifty first birthday.