Grant Wood

In the summer of 1930, Grant Wood was driving through the little town of Eldon, Iowa, when he noticed a plain white farmhouse with one absurdly grand pointed window, built in a style called Carpenter Gothic. He decided to paint the house and the kind of people he imagined living in it.

For those two stern figures he used people close to him. The woman was his own sister, Nan, and the dour man with the pitchfork was his dentist, Dr Byron McKeeby of Cedar Rapids. He posed them separately and stretched their faces slightly to echo the tall window behind them. The painting, American Gothic, won a prize at the Art Institute of Chicago that year and became one of the most recognised images in American art, endlessly parodied ever since.

Wood was a leader of Regionalism, a movement of the 1930s that turned away from European abstraction toward plain scenes of the American Midwest, its farms and rolling fields. He spent nearly his whole life in Iowa and taught at its state university. His sister Nan lived until 1990 and spent decades reminding people that Wood had meant the two figures as father and daughter, a relationship viewers often mistook.