Grant Wood
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
40 free Grant Wood trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Almost everyone knows the painting: a stern man, a wary woman and a white wooden house with a pointed window. Far fewer people know much about the man who made it. Grant Wood grew up on an Iowa farm, trained as a craftsman as well as a painter, and turned the people and fields around him into some of the most recognisable pictures in American art. This quiz gathers the fun facts behind the famous image and the life around it: who the two models really were, what Wood said the picture meant, where he worked, what else he painted, and the unexpected places his name and his pictures have turned up since. Every answer comes with a short explanation. The questions start easy, so they work for kids, classrooms and family quiz nights, and they get harder for readers who already know their American art.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which acquaintance of Grant Wood posed as the grim-faced farmer in his 1930 painting American Gothic?
His dentist
His dentist, Byron McKeeby, was the model, and Wood added both figures back in his studio after sketching only the empty house.
Q 02According to Grant Wood, how are the pair in American Gothic related, contrary to popular belief?
Father and daughter
Father and daughter, Wood confirmed in a 1941 letter, after newspapers had captioned the picture as an Iowa farmer and his wife.
Q 03What did Grant Wood design for the United States Army near the end of World War I?
Camouflage
Camouflage scenes were Wood's wartime job, and after the war he went back to Iowa to teach art to junior high classes.
Q 04Grant Wood claimed that all his good ideas came to him while he was doing which farm chore?
Milking a cow
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.
Q 05Which everyday object issued in 2004 carries a design based on a Grant Wood schoolhouse painting?
A state quarter
A state quarter for Iowa shows the one-room country school Wood attended as a boy, with his name stamped on the coin.
Q 06Which Revolutionary War rider did Grant Wood paint in 1931, using a child's hobby horse as his model?
Paul Revere
Paul Revere gallops through a brightly lit village seen from high above, a scene Wood took from Longfellow's famous poem.
Q 07Grant Wood designed a hotel dining room, right down to the chandelier, around which farm crop?
Corn
Corn cobs form the light holders of the chandelier Wood made in 1925 for the Hotel Montrose, in a room ringed with his murals.
Q 08Grant Wood died of pancreatic cancer in February 1942, just one day before which personal milestone?
His 51st birthday
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.
Q 09Which legend about young George Washington did Grant Wood stage like a play in Parson Weems' Fable?
The cherry tree
The cherry tree tale was invented by Parson Weems for his Washington biography, so Wood painted Weems pulling back a curtain on it.
Q 10Grant Wood said he had to go to which country, where he studied painting, to appreciate Iowa?
France
France was where Wood studied in the 1920s, and he gave this reply when angry Iowans accused him of mocking them in American Gothic.
Q 11In Grant Wood's American Gothic, which farm tool does the stern-faced man grip upright in his hand?
A pitchfork
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.
Q 12Which relative of Grant Wood, later the heir to his estate, modeled for the woman in American Gothic?
His sister
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.
Q 13Which museum bought American Gothic soon after it was first exhibited in 1930 and still displays it today?
Art Institute of Chicago
Q 21After a family death in 1901, Grant Wood's mother moved her children from the farm to which Iowa city?
Cedar Rapids
Cedar Rapids became his base for decades, and its art museum now holds the world's largest collection of his work.
Q 22Grant Wood painted American Gothic in a studio he made in the carriage-house hayloft of which kind of business?
A funeral home
A funeral home run by David Turner gave Wood the loft in return for decorating work, and he invented its address, 5 Turner Alley.
Q 23Grant Wood went to Munich in 1928 to oversee his only design in which medium, made for a veterans memorial?
Stained glass
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.
Q 14In American Gothic, what work garment does the man wear beneath his dark suit jacket?
Overalls
Overalls became Wood's own trademark too: he adopted denim as his signature look, the everyday dress of Iowa farmers.
Q 15Which TV drama about suburban neighbors on Wisteria Lane features American Gothic in its opening titles?
Desperate Housewives
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.
Q 16In 1931 Grant Wood painted the small Iowa cottage where which United States president was born?
Herbert Hoover
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.
Q 17Grant Wood became a leading voice of which 1930s American art movement devoted to rural Midwestern scenes?
Regionalism
Regionalism rejected European abstraction in favor of everyday local scenes, and Wood crossed the country giving lectures to promote it.
Q 18Before turning to sharp detail, Grant Wood painted soft, sunlit scenes in which earlier style?
Impressionism
Impressionism shaped his early landscapes until a 1928 trip to Munich, where sharply detailed old-master paintings changed his mind.
Q 19In which small southern Iowa town does the white cottage in the background of American Gothic still stand?
Eldon
Eldon keeps the cottage as a museum site where visitors can borrow costumes and pose out front like the painted pair.
Q 20Grant Wood was born on a farm near which eastern Iowa town, where he is also buried?
Anamosa
Anamosa lies about four miles from the farm, and Wood spent his first ten years there before the family left for the city.
Stained glass from Germany in a World War I memorial angered local patriots so much that the window was not dedicated until 1955.
Q 24Which patriotic lineage society did Grant Wood lampoon in a 1932 painting he called his only satire?
Daughters of the American Revolution
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.
Q 25In Grant Wood's Victorian Survival, which modern object sits beside his stern, old-fashioned great-aunt?
A dial telephone
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.
Q 26What did artists live in, and decorate themselves, at the summer art colony Grant Wood co-founded in 1932?
Ice wagons
Ice wagons served as bedrooms at a colony that never paid its way, even though Wood and the other teachers worked there for free.
Q 27Which Iowa village, the subject of Grant Wood's first major landscape, later hosted his art colony?
Stone City
Stone City appears in his 1930 landscape as a place of fantastical curving hills, painted the same year as American Gothic.
Q 28Which Missouri-born muralist completes the famous Midwestern trio of Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry?
Thomas Hart Benton
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.
Q 29In Grant Wood's 1929 portrait of his mother Hattie, which hardy houseplant does she hold in her lap?
Snake plant
Snake plant, also called mother-in-law's tongue, turns up again a year later on the porch in American Gothic.
Q 30What piece of jewelry does the woman in Grant Wood's American Gothic wear with her print apron?
A cameo brooch
A cameo brooch completes an outfit Wood copied from his family photo album, so the pair look like people from an earlier age.