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Status On View, Gallery 263 Department Arts of the Americas Artist Grant Wood Title American Gothic Place United States (Artist's nationality) Date 1930 Medium Oil on Beaver Board Inscriptions Signed and dated lower right on overalls: GRANT / WOOD / 1930 Dimensions 78 × 65.3 cm (30 3/4 × 25 3/4 in.) Credit Line Friends of American Art Collection Reference Number 1930.934 Extended information about this artwork Yet Wood intended it to convey a positive image of rural American values, offering a vision of reassurance at the beginning of the Great Depression. Many understood the work to be a satirical comment on midwesterners out of step with a modernizing world. When it was exhibited at the Art Institute in 1930, the painting became an instant sensation, its ambiguity prompting viewers to speculate about the figures and their story. Wood had seen a similar farmhouse during a visit to Eldon, Iowa.

In American Gothic, Grant Wood directly evoked images of an earlier generation by featuring a farmer and his daughter posed stiffly and dressed as if they were, as the artist put it, “tintypes from my old family album.” They stand outside of their home, built in an 1880s style known as Carpenter Gothic.
