The stern-looking pair in this painting were never actually married, and neither one of them lived in the house behind them.
What you're looking at
Grant Wood painted American Gothic in 1930 after spotting a small white farmhouse in Eldon, Iowa, built in a style called Carpenter Gothic — named for its narrow, pointed upstairs window, copied in wood from stone Gothic church windows. Wood imagined the kind of stern, old-fashioned people who might live in a house with a window like that, and built the painting around that idea.
A dentist, a sister, and an instant icon
The two models weren't a married couple at all: the woman is Wood's own sister, Nan, and the man is his dentist, Dr. Byron McKeeby. Wood dressed them as a farmer and his daughter standing in front of the house he'd seen, holding a pitchfork whose three tines are echoed in the stitching of the man's overalls and the shape of the window above them.
The painting was shown at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1930, which still holds it today, and it became one of the most recognized and most parodied images in American art almost immediately — endlessly reproduced with different faces, different props, and different settings ever since.
One detail to look for
Trace the pitchfork's three-pronged shape upward: it repeats in the stitching lines on the man's overalls and again in the pointed window behind them. Wood built the whole composition around that one repeating triangle.
See it at its real size
Our canvas print is labeled against the true size of the original, held at the Art Institute of Chicago, so what you hang is honestly scaled, not a guess. Shop the canvas print.