About the Artist
Grant Wood
Grant Wood (1891 – 1942) was an American painter best known for his paintings depicting the rural American Midwest, particularly 'American Gothic', an iconic painting of the 20th century. Wood began as an apprentice in a local metal shop. Wood enrolled in The Handicraft Guild, an art school run entirely by women in Minneapolis in 1910 (now a prominent artist collective in the city). In 1913, he enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and performed some work as a silversmith. From 1922 to 1928, Wood made four trips to Europe, where he studied many styles of painting, especially Impressionism and post-Impressionism. However, it was the work of the 15th-century Flemish artist Jan van Eyck that influenced him to take on the clarity of this technique and to incorporate it in his new works. In 1932, Wood helped found the Stone City Art Colony near his hometown to help artists get through the Great Depression. He became a great proponent of regionalism in the arts, lecturing throughout the country on the topic. As his classically American image was solidified, his bohemian days in Paris were expunged from his public persona. Wood was an active painter from an extremely young age until his death, and although he is best known for his paintings, he worked in a large number of media, including lithography, ink, charcoal, ceramics, metal, wood and found objects. Wood's best known work, his 1930 painting American Gothic, is one of the most famous paintings in American art, and one of the few images to reach the status of widely recognised cultural icon, comparable to Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa and Edvard Munch's The Scream.
