Grant Wood

Grant Wood was an American painter who is best known for his paintings depicting the rural American Midwest, particularly the painting American Gothic, an iconic image of the 20th century. He was born in 1981 in Iowa and attended school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. From 1920 to 1928, he made four trips to Europe, where he studied many styles of painting, especially Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. But it was the work of the 15th-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. Wood's best known work is his 1930 painting American Gothic which featured a farmer and his daughter standing in front of a small white house with a Gothic-style window in the background. It is representative of traditional American rural values. The faces in this painting look depressed and almost rigid. This painting has been used in many other ways and has taken on many different roles through out the years through satire and recreations.