Töchter der Revolution

Grant Wood called this the only satire he ever painted, and it was payback. A few years earlier he'd designed a stained-glass window for a war memorial in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and because he judged American glass not good enough, he had it made in Germany. The local Daughters of the American Revolution were furious, Germany having been the enemy in a war barely a decade past, and they attacked him in public. So in 1932 he painted three of them, prim and pinched, one clutching a teacup with a delicate blue pattern. Behind them he hung the great patriotic scene of Washington Crossing the Delaware, which happened to have been painted in Germany, by a German-born artist named Emanuel Leutze.