Grant Wood

Grant Wood painted American Gothic, which is among the most parodied images ever made, and spent the rest of his career being misread by both the people who loved it and the people who did not. He was an Iowa farmer's son, trained in Minneapolis and at the Art Institute of Chicago, made four trips to Europe and was painting loose Impressionist landscapes until he saw Memling and the Northern Renaissance in Munich in 1928 and changed completely. American Gothic followed in 1930: a white house with a Gothic window in Eldon, Iowa, and in front of it his dentist and his own sister Nan, in a colonial apron he had bought, holding a pitchfork. Iowans complained it mocked them; critics called it a satire on rural narrowness; Wood said it was neither and that he had meant the people to be admired. It won a bronze medal and three hundred dollars. He became the figurehead of Regionalism, arguing that American painters should work from what they knew rather than from Paris, and ran a New Deal art project in Iowa and taught at the state university, where the faculty fought him bitterly. He was homosexual and lived carefully; a brief marriage ended badly. He died of pancreatic cancer the day before his fifty-first birthday. The house in Eldon is now a visitor centre where people queue to be photographed in the pose. His sister Nan spent decades objecting to parodies and sued over some of them. Daughters of Revolution, painted in 1932, satirises the patriotic societies and made him enemies in Cedar Rapids. He is buried in Anamosa, Iowa.

• Lived: 1891 CE – 1942 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: artist