Grant Wood claimed that the inspiration for his painting, American Gothic, came from a house that he chanced to see when he was being driven around Iowa by a local artist in the summer of 1930. The house is on a slight rise above the town of Eldon, a quiet farm town about 20 miles north of the Missouri border. Wood said he was drawn by the upstairs front window, which reminded him of cathedral windows he had seen in France. Wood’s first biographer, says that the window caught Wood’s eye because he thought it was “a structural absurdity,” according to Smithsonian Magazine. In pictures of Wood, he always has a smiling hovering around his lips, and his eyes are always twinkling. Jane Smiley writes in Smithsonian that while doing the same drive Wood did, she thought about how “art is an exploration—when your idea triggers your interest, your job is to find your way to the product, to play with your materials until you have no more ideas, and then let the product go.” Wood lived in France for years, but when he returned to Iowa, he found something in his lifelong home that Impressionist techniques could not capture. He shaved his Parisian beard, started wearing overalls again, and changed his artistic style. His art took unexpected directions as he drew on multiple skills to create a “unified vision of the world he knew,” writes Smithsonian.
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