This familiar image was exhibited publicly for the first time at the Art Institute of Chicago, winning a three-hundred-dollar prize and instant fame for Grant Wood.
The impetus for the painting came while Wood was visiting the small town of Eldon in his native Iowa, according to the Art Institute of Chicago.
There he spotted a little wood farmhouse, with a single oversized window, made in a style called Carpenter Gothic. He used his sister and his dentist as models for a farmer and his daughter, dressing them as if they were “tintypes from my old family album,” the Art Institute officials state.
The highly detailed, polished style and the rigid frontality of the two figures were inspired by Flemish Renaissance art, which Wood studied during his travels to Europe between 1920 and 1926, Art Institute officials state.
For more information click here: Art Institute of Chicago