American Gothic

On the Canvas

A pitchfork that repeats itself four times

The panel is small by museum standards, 30¾ by 25¾ inches, barely bigger than a sheet of poster board. Wood didn't use canvas at all; he painted on beaverboard, a cheap, dead-flat wallboard that let him render detail with jeweler's precision instead of fighting the weave of a canvas. Behind the house, between the roofline and the sky, stand seven slender trees and the barely-there spire of a country church, which from this distance echoes the sharp pitch of the roof in front of it.

The farmer holds his pitchfork upright, like a weapon at parade rest, its three tines pointed skyward. That same sharp shape gets repeated on purpose three more times: in the Gothic-arched attic window behind the pair, in the pitch of the roofline, in the vertical seams of his overalls, which run straight up into the stitching of his shirt, and even in the three narrow leaves of a snake plant potted on the porch, which Wood worked into the scene specifically for that rhyme. The woman stands a half-step behind and beside him, a floral-print apron over a dark dress with an almost clerical collar, hair pulled back hard, a cameo pinned at her throat. The one thing that breaks rank in all this symmetry is a single loose strand of hair by her temple.

The shutters are closed, the curtains drawn, and the sky is flat and sourceless, neither morning nor evening. Wood keeps the palette to three or four earth tones: the ochre of dry wood, the black of the man's wool jacket, a muted green behind the house. Nothing bright enough to pull the eye from two faces that look at the viewer without warmth, and never at each other.

Making It

A house spotted from a moving car

In August 1930, the painter John Sharp was driving Grant Wood around Eldon, in southeastern Iowa, when Wood noticed a tiny white frame house wearing a Gothic-arched window far too grand for it. According to his early biographer Darrell Garwood, Wood found the mismatch funny, a flimsy “carpenter Gothic” farmhouse dressed up with a window borrowed from a cathedral, and decided on the spot that the house was “worth painting.” The house, it later turned out, had been built in 1881-82 by Charles and Catherine Dibble; Charles, a Civil War veteran, ran a livery stable in town, and the arched window itself appears to have been mail-ordered from the Sears catalog.

The owners let him sketch from the front yard; he worked in pencil on cardboard and left the same day without painting a single figure on site. The man and woman were added later, back in his Cedar Rapids studio, from memory and photographs. He didn't hire strangers: he used his own sister Nan, then thirty-one, and the family dentist, Byron McKeeby, past sixty, posing each of them separately rather than together.

Nan sewed her own apron for the sitting, unpicking rickrack trim from dresses that had belonged to their late mother, Hattie, because matching trim wasn't sold in stores that year. Wood built up the paint in thin, dry layers, chasing the smooth, almost enamel finish he had been practicing for two years. There's no record of major reworking or later restoration; the board has simply held up, remarkably evenly, for close to a century.

Its Roots

Munich taught him to stare

Before Munich, Wood had spent nearly twenty years scraping by however he could: painting stained glass, forging decorative ironwork, teaching school, and turning out loose, fairly derivative landscapes in a borrowed Impressionist manner. None of those landscapes made him famous.

Two years before Eldon, in 1928, Wood spent several months in Munich overseeing the fabrication of a stained-glass window he had designed for a war memorial back in Cedar Rapids. On his days off he haunted the Alte Pinakothek, and that's really where his mature style got built, not in front of the Impressionists he had been imitating for years, but in front of the Northern Renaissance panels of van Eyck, Memling, and Dürer. Their hard edges, their flat, even light with no atmospheric haze, their habit of painting a foreground button with the same care as a tree on the horizon, hit him like a conversion.

He brought that discipline home and swapped in new subjects: Flemish burghers became Iowa farmers, brocade became bib overalls, a cathedral in the background became a cornfield. American Gothic is the first fully realized result of that switch; the couple hold the same stiff, frontal, faintly formal pose you'd find on a fifteenth-century donor panel.

Edward Hopper was working a similar vein around the same years: Nighthawks turns an anonymous diner into a portrait of the whole country with the same flat, unsentimental clarity. Wood's own road to this painting is laid out on his artist page.

What Happened Next

A medal that almost wasn't awarded

In the fall of 1930, Wood entered the painting in the Art Institute of Chicago's 43rd Annual Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture. The jury's first instinct was to wave it off as a “comic valentine”, or so the story goes. One of the museum's patrons pushed back hard enough to force a second look, and the picture came away with the Norman Wait Harris bronze medal and a $300 prize. The same patron then talked the museum into buying it outright for the permanent collection, through the Friends of American Art fund.

It has never changed hands since. The Art Institute has held it for nearly a century and lends it out sparingly, only a handful of loans this century. Its first trip outside the United States didn't happen until 2016–2017: first to the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, from October 15, 2016 to January 30, 2017, then to the Royal Academy of Arts in London, from February 25 to June 4, 2017. There's no theft in its history and no ownership dispute over the original; the legal fights, as it turns out, were reserved for the copies.

The house itself, back in Eldon, had a quieter and much more ordinary fate. It stayed a private home for most of the twentieth century, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1974, and only became a museum in 1991, when its owners handed it over to the State Historical Society of Iowa.

In Culture

The house got offended, then the world borrowed the fork

The neighbors took offense first. When the image ran in the Cedar Rapids Gazette, Iowans recognized the house and decided Wood had painted them as grim, puritanical scolds; farm wives reportedly promised to “punch his face” if they ever met him. Wood answered with a line that's been quoted ever since: “I had to go to France to appreciate Iowa.” Gertrude Stein and Christopher Morley initially read the canvas the same way, as small-town satire, until the Depression flipped that reading entirely: the exact same picture started looking like a hymn to endurance, without a single brushstroke changing.

What followed was a parody machine that never really stopped: the composition boils down to two upright figures and one object held between them, which makes swapping out the pitchfork almost trivial. Versions have turned up in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Simpsons, SpongeBob SquarePants, King of the Hill, and the Broadway musical The Music Man, among hundreds of others. In 1942, the photographer Gordon Parks restaged it in earnest: the government office cleaner Ella Watson stands before an American flag holding a broom and mop instead of a pitchfork. American Gothic, Washington, D.C. became its own statement on racial and economic inequality.

Not every parody got away with it. In April 1977, Hustler magazine printed a nude version clearly modeled on Nan Wood Graham. She was nearly eighty by then and sued for invasion of privacy; the case went all the way to the California Supreme Court, which declined to hear it, ruling that the parody wasn't specifically “of and concerning” her. For sheer name recognition and endless quotability, American Gothic gets compared in the U.S. to little besides the Mona Lisa, allowing that a pitchfork is a lot easier to borrow than a smile.

That business of borrowing the pitchfork isn't just a figure of speech anymore, either. A visitor center opened next to the real house in Eldon in 2007, and for a small fee it hands out an apron, overalls, and an actual pitchfork so tourists can stand on the lawn and strike the pose themselves; something like a thousand people a year do it. In 2019, the critic Kelly Grovier floated yet another reading, offered as one interpretation rather than settled fact: he tied the small ball atop the roof's weathervane to Pluto, discovered that same year, 1930, and read the whole scene through the myth of Pluto and Proserpina.