'American Gothic' Artist Grant Wood

When Grant Wood was still a young boy, his family relocated to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, after his father died in 1901. Grant soon began to work in a local metal shop as an apprentice. After his high school graduation, Grant began attending an art school in Minneapolis in 1910, and returned a year later to teach in a one-room schoolhouse. In 1913 he enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and did some work as a silversmith.

In the 1920s, Grant made four trips to Europe, where he studied many styles of painting, especially impressionism and post-impressionism. But it was the work of the fifteenth-century Flemish artist Jan Van Eyck that influenced him to take on the clarity of this new technique and to incorporate it in his new works. From 1924 to 1935 Wood lived in the loft of a carriage house that he turned into his personal studio at "5 Turner Alley" (the studio had no address until Wood made one up himself). In 1932, Wood helped launch the Stone City Art Colony to assist artists in getting through the Great Depression. He emerged a big supporter of regionalism, speaking throughout the U.S. on the genre.

In 1934, Grant became a painting instructor in the School of Art at the University of Iowa. During that period, he oversaw mural painting projects, tought students, produced a variety of his own works, and became a integral part of the University's cultural community. On February 12, 1942, one day before his 51st birthday, Wood died at the university hospital of liver cancer.

The estate of Grant Wood went to his sister, Nan, the woman portrayed in American Gothic. When she passed away in 1990, her entire estate, along with Wood's personal mementos and much of his artwork, became the property of the Figge Art Museum in the Iowa town of Davenport.