40 Fun Facts About Grant Wood

Which acquaintance of Grant Wood posed as the grim-faced farmer in his 1930 painting American Gothic?

His dentist, Byron McKeeby, was the model, and Wood added both figures back in his studio after sketching only the empty house.

According to Grant Wood, how are the pair in American Gothic related, contrary to popular belief?

Father and daughter, Wood confirmed in a 1941 letter, after newspapers had captioned the picture as an Iowa farmer and his wife.

What did Grant Wood design for the United States Army near the end of World War I?

Camouflage scenes were Wood's wartime job, and after the war he went back to Iowa to teach art to junior high classes.

Grant Wood claimed that all his good ideas came to him while he was doing which farm chore?

Milking a cow was Wood's answer, part of a farm-boy image he built in the 1930s after playing down his art-school years in Europe.

Which everyday object issued in 2004 carries a design based on a Grant Wood schoolhouse painting?

A state quarter for Iowa shows the one-room country school Wood attended as a boy, with his name stamped on the coin.

Which Revolutionary War rider did Grant Wood paint in 1931, using a child's hobby horse as his model?

Paul Revere gallops through a brightly lit village seen from high above, a scene Wood took from Longfellow's famous poem.

Grant Wood designed a hotel dining room, right down to the chandelier, around which farm crop?

Corn cobs form the light holders of the chandelier Wood made in 1925 for the Hotel Montrose, in a room ringed with his murals.

Grant Wood died of pancreatic cancer in February 1942, just one day before which personal milestone?

His 51st birthday fell the next day, February 13, and Wood was buried in the small Iowa town near the farm where he was born.

Which legend about young George Washington did Grant Wood stage like a play in Parson Weems' Fable?

The cherry tree tale was invented by Parson Weems for his Washington biography, so Wood painted Weems pulling back a curtain on it.

Grant Wood said he had to go to which country, where he studied painting, to appreciate Iowa?

France was where Wood studied in the 1920s, and he gave this reply when angry Iowans accused him of mocking them in American Gothic.

In Grant Wood's American Gothic, which farm tool does the stern-faced man grip upright in his hand?

A pitchfork with three prongs, whose shape Wood repeated in the stitching of the man's clothes and in the tall pointed window behind him.

Which relative of Grant Wood, later the heir to his estate, modeled for the woman in American Gothic?

His sister Nan sewed the apron herself at his request, and years later she led the first efforts to preserve the little cottage in the painting.

Which museum bought American Gothic soon after it was first exhibited in 1930 and still displays it today?

Art Institute of Chicago bought the painting after a museum patron, who had already talked the jury into giving it a prize, urged the purchase.

In American Gothic, what work garment does the man wear beneath his dark suit jacket?

Overalls became Wood's own trademark too: he adopted denim as his signature look, the everyday dress of Iowa farmers.

Which TV drama about suburban neighbors on Wisteria Lane features American Gothic in its opening titles?

Desperate Housewives joined a long line of spoofs of the couple, who had already turned up in The Music Man and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

In 1931 Grant Wood painted the small Iowa cottage where which United States president was born?

Herbert Hoover was born in West Branch, in a white board-and-batten cottage much like the one Wood had made famous a year earlier.

Grant Wood became a leading voice of which 1930s American art movement devoted to rural Midwestern scenes?

Regionalism rejected European abstraction in favor of everyday local scenes, and Wood crossed the country giving lectures to promote it.

Before turning to sharp detail, Grant Wood painted soft, sunlit scenes in which earlier style?

Impressionism shaped his early landscapes until a 1928 trip to Munich, where sharply detailed old-master paintings changed his mind.

In which small southern Iowa town does the white cottage in the background of American Gothic still stand?

Eldon keeps the cottage as a museum site where visitors can borrow costumes and pose out front like the painted pair.

Grant Wood was born on a farm near which eastern Iowa town, where he is also buried?

Anamosa lies about four miles from the farm, and Wood spent his first ten years there before the family left for the city.

After a family death in 1901, Grant Wood's mother moved her children from the farm to which Iowa city?

Cedar Rapids became his base for decades, and its art museum now holds the world's largest collection of his work.

Grant Wood painted American Gothic in a studio he made in the carriage-house hayloft of which kind of business?

A funeral home run by David Turner gave Wood the loft in return for decorating work, and he invented its address, 5 Turner Alley.

Grant Wood went to Munich in 1928 to oversee his only design in which medium, made for a veterans memorial?

Stained glass from Germany in a World War I memorial angered local patriots so much that the window was not dedicated until 1955.

Which patriotic lineage society did Grant Wood lampoon in a 1932 painting he called his only satire?

Daughters of the American Revolution members had attacked his German-made war memorial, so Wood posed three smug ladies before a patriotic scene painted in Germany.

In Grant Wood's Victorian Survival, which modern object sits beside his stern, old-fashioned great-aunt?

A dial telephone jars with the sitter's stiff pose in a picture Wood modeled on an old tintype, copying its sepia tones and rounded edges.

What did artists live in, and decorate themselves, at the summer art colony Grant Wood co-founded in 1932?

Ice wagons served as bedrooms at a colony that never paid its way, even though Wood and the other teachers worked there for free.

Which Iowa village, the subject of Grant Wood's first major landscape, later hosted his art colony?

Stone City appears in his 1930 landscape as a place of fantastical curving hills, painted the same year as American Gothic.

Which Missouri-born muralist completes the famous Midwestern trio of Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry?

Thomas Hart Benton left New York in 1935 for his native Missouri, where he painted a mural of the state's social history for the capitol.

In Grant Wood's 1929 portrait of his mother Hattie, which hardy houseplant does she hold in her lap?

Snake plant, also called mother-in-law's tongue, turns up again a year later on the porch in American Gothic.

What piece of jewelry does the woman in Grant Wood's American Gothic wear with her print apron?

A cameo brooch completes an outfit Wood copied from his family photo album, so the pair look like people from an earlier age.

Rather than canvas, Grant Wood painted American Gothic in oil on which inexpensive building material?

Beaverboard is a building board pressed from wood fibre, and artists have only occasionally used it in place of canvas.

Which photographer made a famous 1942 parody of American Gothic showing cleaner Ella Watson with a broom?

Gordon Parks posed Watson, a government cleaner, stiffly before an American flag, and the picture became one of his best-known photographs.

While taking night classes in art, Grant Wood earned his living for a time in which metalworking trade?

Silversmith work, first for the Kalo shop and then in his own small Volund shop, paid for his night classes until the business failed.

At the junior high where he taught, Grant Wood built a Mourner's Bench for whom to sit on?

Misbehaving pupils waited on it for the principal, and the name joked about the mourner's bench found in Methodist churches.

Shortly after Grant Wood's death, what kind of World War II vessel was named in his honor?

A Liberty ship named SS Grant Wood was launched in Florida in 1943, one of the mass-produced cargo carriers usually named after famous Americans.

Grant Wood illustrated a special edition of which Sinclair Lewis novel set in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota?

Main Street got nine Wood drawings of small-town types, and he signed every one of the 1,500 copies printed.

Which old-fashioned trim did Grant Wood want on the American Gothic apron, cut from his mother's dresses?

Rickrack was no longer sold in stores by 1930, so Nan stripped it from old family clothes to finish the apron she sewed.

Which future sculptor of Black women and children studied under Grant Wood at the University of Iowa?

Elizabeth Catlett took Wood's advice to depict what she knew best, and in 1940 became the first African-American woman to earn the university's MFA.

Which Iowa institution inherited Grant Wood's estate and owns the Self-Portrait he painted in oils?

Figge Art Museum in Davenport received his personal effects, archive and artworks in 1990, on the death of his heir, Nan Wood Graham.

In 1940 Grant Wood was among nine painters hired to record the making of which John Ford film?

The Long Voyage Home, drawn from Eugene O'Neill's sea plays, gave the artists studios on the lot so they could paint its scenes and cast.