Grant Wood

Grant Wood grew up in Iowa, trained at the Minneapolis Handicraft Guild and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and made several study trips to Europe. Seeing Early Netherlandish painting in Munich in 1928 pushed him toward a crisp, polished realism. American Gothic, shown in Chicago in 1930, made him the leading figure of Regionalism alongside Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry. The farmer and his daughter were modelled by Wood's dentist and his sister Nan.