Grant Wood

Grant DeVolson Wood (February 13, 1891 – February 12, 1942) was an American painter born four miles (6 km) east of Anamosa, Iowa. He is best known for his paintings depicting the rural American Midwest, particularly American Gothic, an iconic painting of the 20th century.

Life and career

Grant Wood was born in rural Iowa in 1891; his mother moved the family to Cedar Rapids after his father died in 1901. Soon thereafter he began as an apprentice in a local metal shop. After graduating from Washington High School, Wood enrolled in The Handicraft Guild, an art school run entirely by women in Minneapolis in 1910 (today it is a prominent artist collective in the city.) He was said to have later returned to the Guild to paint American Gothic. A year later Wood returned to Iowa, where he taught in a rural one-room schoolhouse. 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. But 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.