Grant Wood, Death on the Ridge Road

Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown

Date: 1935
Technique: Oil on masonite

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Grant Wood, American Gothic

The Art Institute of Chicago

Date: 1930
Technique: Oil on beaver board, 78 x 65.3 cm

Grant Wood adopted the precise realism of 15th-century northern European artists, but his native Iowa provided the artist with his subject matter. American Gothic depicts a farmer and his spinster daughter posing before their house, whose gabled window and tracery, in the American gothic style, inspired the painting's title. In fact, the models were the painter's sister and their dentist. Wood was accused of creating in this work a satire on the intolerance and rigidity that the insular nature of rural life can produce; he denied the accusation. American Gothic is an image that epitomizes the Puritan ethic and virtues that he believed dignified the Midwestern character.

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