Grant Wood was the second child in a family of four born to Francis Maryville Wood and Hattie Weaver Wood, farmers in Anamosa, Iowa. Maryville’s family had Quaker roots in Pennsylvania; Hattie came from New England stock. Their parents had been among Iowa’s pioneering families. When Wood died, just 51 years later, he was a nationally famous painter, an avatar of middle American culture and values expressed in iconic oil paintings. Wood’s art and his persona were deliberately regional, trumpeting a proudly provincial brand of straightforward avowedly authentic simplicity. The path to that identity, however, lay through Chicago, Paris, Italy, and Germany before coming home to firmly roost in Cedar Rapids and Iowa City. Wood’s life can be divided roughly into decades. His first ten years were spent on the family farm. Wood’s father was a stern man who died suddenly, of a heart attack, when Grant was ten years old. Hattie Wood sold the farm and moved the family to nearby Cedar Rapids, where she had relatives. Those ten years on the farm, a time of hard work and limited outside contact, became the core of Wood’s mature artistic inspiration. The physical distance from farm to town was only about forty miles, but the change in daily life was transformative. Three decades later Wood mythologized nostalgic recollections of his rural childhood into the images that informed the series of oil paintings that made him a celebrated American artist.
Wood was artistic as a child, a proclivity encouraged by his widowed mother (in the absence, it must be noted, of his late father, who likely would have disapproved). Encouraged also by the art teacher at his elementary school, Wood soon attracted local notice of his talent when, at the age of fourteen, he won first prize for a drawing of leaves he submitted to a New York competition. In high school he drew for the yearbook and made sets for theatrical production together with his lifelong friend and fellow Iowa artist, Marvin Cone (1891–1965). Through his high school years, Wood took on odd jobs to help support his family. Grant Wood knew that he wanted to be an artist, but with equal conviction, knew that his art needed to yield a living. Wood’s early work as an artist was firmly rooted in the context of the Arts and Crafts movement, an aesthetic ethos, imported from Europe and adapted for America that privileged “art for life” and, by extension, art production for patrons who prized and would pay for art in their homes and businesses. Wood sought formal instruction in a catch-as-catch-can manner: through correspondence courses, evening courses and part-time studies. He never committed himself to prolonged instruction, but he was not untutored, and at various times studied at the Art Institute in Chicago, as well as the Académie Julien in Paris. In 1911 and 1912, he supported himself working in a succession of jobs while trying to make a living in art related activities. Teaching was always a fallback. He taught in 1911, and then intermittently from 1919 to 1925. From 1913 to 1916, he lived in Chicago where he was employed as a jewelry and household wares designer at the Kalo Silversmith Shop. Wood’s early career is notable for the variety of media he mastered and produced, jewelry and metalsmithing, sculpture, architecture, interior design, and home building, as well as drawing and painting. In 1918 to 1919, he served in the United States Army, first in Iowa and then in Wahington, D.C. where he designed camouflage and supplemented his salary by sketching fellow soldiers.
After the war, Wood took a job as a middle school teacher, working on and off until 1925 when he finally established himself as a full-time freelance artist, decorator, and designer. During the decade of the 1920s Grant Wood spent substantial time in Europe. In 1920, he went to Paris with Marvin Cone. Cone had graduated from Coe College, a relationship that he maintained for his entire life as a member of the Coe faculty. Wood returned to Europe for the year 1923–24, based in Paris and traveling to the French countryside and painting in Sorrento, Italy. When he returned to Cedar Rapids, he designed a home for himself and his mother. Wood traveled again in June and July of 1926 where he painted in Paris and southern France. In the Fall, he resumed life in Iowa, exhibiting his European works. A 1927 commission to design stained-glass windows for a Veteran’s Memorial Building in Cedar Rapids resulted in Wood’s residence from September to December of 1928 in Munich to supervise the production of the windows. The trip to Germany proved seminal. While his earliest work distinctly echoes the tastes of the American Arts and Crafts style, by the 1920s, reflecting his trips to Europe, Wood was painting in an American impressionist style. In Munich, Wood found himself fascinated by the collection in the Alte Pinokothek, particularly the artists Hans Memling and Albrecht Dürer with their hard-edged drawing, stylized decoration, and luminous colors. Wood had already decided to shift his attention to local Iowa subject matter. In Germany he found the technique, methods, and language for his new artistic expression.
Grant Wood returned to Cedar Rapids in December 1928. He never returned to Europe. As the western world plunged into economic depression, Grant Wood settled firmly into Iowa. This is not to say that he became a provincial. He taught at the University of Iowa and was actively involved in bringing American artists and writers to visit and speak, hosting them and presiding over a salon of invited guests and friends first in Cedar Rapids and later in Iowa City. He attempted to establish an artist’s colony in nearby Stone City. He envisioned Iowa as a regional art center, one of hopefully a number that would counterbalance the domination of the East Coast.
