American Gothic in popular culture
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| Artist | Grant Wood |
| Year | 1930 |
| Type | Oil on beaverboard |
| Dimensions | 78 cm × 65.3 cm (30¾ in × 25¾ in) |
| Location | Art Institute of Chicago |
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 Smarthistory - Grant Wood's American Gothic
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American Gothic House
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American Gothic is a painting by Grant Wood in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Wood's inspiration came in his decision to paint what is known as the American Gothic House along with "the kind of people I fancied should live in that house." He painted it in 1930, depicting a farmer standing beside a woman who has been interpreted to be his daughter or his wife. The figures were modeled by Wood's sister Nan Wood Graham and their dentist Dr. Byron McKeeby. The woman is dressed in a colonial print apron evoking 19th-century Americana, and the man is holding a pitchfork. The plants on the porch of the house are mother-in-law's tongue and beefsteak begonia, which are the same as the plants in Wood's 1929 portrait of his mother Woman with Plants.
It is one of the most familiar images in 20th-century American art and has been widely parodied in American popular culture. The painting was displayed in Paris at the Musée de l'Orangerie in its first showing outside the United States on October 15, 2016 – January 30, 2017, and in London at the Royal Academy of Arts February 25 – June 4, 2017.
In August 1930, Grant Wood, an American painter with European training, was driven around Eldon, Iowa, by a young painter from Eldon, John Sharp. Looking for inspiration, Wood noticed the Dibble House, a small white house built in the Carpenter Gothic architectural style. Sharp's brother suggested in 1973 that it was on this drive that Wood first sketched the house on the back of an envelope. Wood's earliest biographer, Darrell Garwood, noted that Wood "thought it a form of borrowed pretentiousness, a structural absurdity, to put a Gothic-style window in such a flimsy frame house." At the time, Wood classified it as one of the "cardboardy frame houses on Iowa farms" and considered it "very paintable". After obtaining permission from the Jones family, the house's owners, Wood made a sketch the next day in oil on paperboard from the house's front yard. This sketch displayed a steeper roof and a longer window with a more pronounced ogive than on the actual house, features which eventually adorned the final work.
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