The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere

Grant Wood painted this in 1931, at the bottom of the Great Depression and the year after his American Gothic had made him famous. It shows Paul Revere galloping through a New England town at night to warn that British troops were coming, back in April 1775. Wood was not after history. He works from a high, bird's-eye view, with a toy-like village of glowing white houses and rounded green trees, a scene closer to a memory or a bedtime story than a record. His real source was a poem, Longfellow's Paul Revere's Ride of 1860, which had already turned that night into legend. For the galloping horse, unable to find a live model that suited him, Wood is said to have worked from a child's wooden hobby horse.