American Gothic

American Gothic is a 1930 oil painting on beaverboard by the American Regionalist artist Grant Wood, depicting a Midwestern farmer and his daughter standing before their Carpenter Gothic style home. Wood was inspired by a small white house in Eldon, Iowa, and by the kind of people he imagined might live in it; the figures were modeled on his sister Nan Wood Graham and his dentist, Byron McKeeby. Measuring about 78 by 65 centimetres, it is held by the Art Institute of Chicago and is one of the most famous and most parodied American paintings of the twentieth century.