Woman with Plants

Grant Wood painted his mother, Hattie, in 1929, just after his last trip to Europe and a year before the picture that made him famous. For most of the 1920s he had chased what he called 'arty' subjects abroad, Impressionist landscapes and Paris streets. Then he came home to Iowa and started looking at what was actually around him. Here Hattie sits in profile against a plain ground, a snake plant in her hands, a strip of rolling farmland behind her. She is dressed plainly, her collar crisp, everything held very still and exact. The hard clarity he would bring to American Gothic the next year is already here, tried out first on his own mother's face and hands.