When Grant Wood clapped eyes on a simple Gothic-style cottage in a small town in southern Iowa he used it for the background to his most famous work. The two models are his sister and his denist.
Wood was often criticised over this work, some thought he was satarising Midwest American values but Wood always insisted that he painted American Gothic as a homage to down-to-earth, Puritan dignity found in small town America.
Wood's crisp and precisely modelled style was derived from the Gothic and Renaissance painters Wood studied during the 1920's |
