10 facts about grant wood

Where did grant wood live

Grant Wood was an American painter who is best known for his work depicting the Midwest. In , he exhibited his most famous painting, American Gothic. Among the most iconic and recognizable images in American art, it helped propel Wood to fame and launch the Regionalist movement, of which Wood became the de facto spokesperson. These idyllic settings would leave a lasting impression on Wood and profoundly influence his later thinking and work, though he would spend much of his life after the age of 10 in the relatively more urban setting of Cedar Rapids, where his mother moved Wood and his younger sister Nan after their father died.

Wood developed his interest in art while still in grammar school and showed promise. He continued to nurture his talents in high school where he designed sets for plays and illustrated student publications. Over the next few years, Wood further expanded his creative repertoire by learning to work with metal and jewelry as well as build furniture. When he moved to Chicago in , he used these skills to make a living.

In Chicago, Wood spent his days at his jewelry and metalworking shop and his evenings developing his talents through correspondence courses and classes at the Art Institute. However, when his mother fell ill in , Wood left Chicago to return to Cedar Rapids, where he took a job as a grammar school teacher to support his mother and sister.

Grant wood style of art

However, his familial obligations did not stop Wood from continuing to make progress as an artist. As such, several years later a local department store held an exhibition that included several of his paintings and led to further commissions. He returned from these trips profoundly inspired by the Impressionists, whose pastoral subject matter spoke to his own sensibilities.

However, it would be on a trip to Munich, Germany—where he was overseeing the production of a stained glass window he had designed for the Veterans Memorial Building in Cedar Rapids—that Wood had the revelation that ultimately changed the direction of his art and propelled him to fame. After seeing the works of 15th- and 16th-century German and Flemish masters, whose realism and attention to detail bowled him over, Wood returned to the United States determined to integrate their approach into his own work.

Abandoning his earlier Impressionistic leanings, Wood began to formulate a more realistic style through which to convey the rural subject matter he had held dear since his youth.