American Gothic

In August 1930, Grant Wood, an American painter with European training, was driven around Eldon, Iowa, by a young local painter named John Sharp. Looking for inspiration, he noticed the Dibble House, a small white house built in the Carpenter Gothic architectural style. Sharp's brother suggested in 1973 that it was on this drive that Wood first sketched the house on the back of an envelope. Wood's earliest biographer, Darrell Garwood, noted that Wood "thought it a form of borrowed pretentiousness, a structural absurdity, to put a Gothic-style window in such a flimsy frame house". At the time, Wood classified it as one of the "cardboardy frame houses on Iowa farms" and considered it "very paintable". After obtaining permission from the house's owners, Selma Jones-Johnston and her family, Wood made a sketch the next day in oil paint on paperboard from the front yard. This sketch depicted a steeper roof and a longer window with a more pronounced ogive than on the actual house – features which eventually adorned the final work.

Wood entered the painting in a competition at the Art Institute of Chicago. One judge deemed it a "comic valentine", but a museum patron persuaded the jury to award the painting the bronze medal and a $300 cash prize. The same patron also persuaded the Art Institute to buy the painting, and it remains part of the Chicago museum's collection. The image soon began to be reproduced in newspapers, first by the Chicago Evening Post, and then in New York, Boston, Kansas City, and Indianapolis. However, when the image finally appeared in the Cedar Rapids Gazette, there was a backlash. Iowans were furious at their depiction as "pinched, grim-faced, puritanical Bible-thumpers". Wood, who had done some of his study in Paris, protested, saying that he had not painted a caricature of Iowans, but rather a depiction of his appreciation, stating "I had to go to France to appreciate Iowa." In a 1941 letter, Wood said that, "In general, I have found, the people who resent the painting are those who feel that they themselves resemble the portrayal."

Imagem: Phil Roeder · BY · Openverse

The Depression-era understanding of the painting as depicting an authentically American scene prompted the first well-known parody, a 1942 photo by Gordon Parks taken in Washington, D.C. of charwoman Ella Watson. American Gothic is a frequently parodied image. It has been lampooned in Broadway shows such as The Music Man, movies such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and television shows such as Green Acres (in the final scene of the opening credits), The Dick Van Dyke Show episode "The Masterpiece", the Pee-Wee's Playhouse episode "Miss Yvonne's Visit", the Arthur episode "Binky Barnes, Art Expert", The Simpsons episode "Bart Gets an Elephant", various SpongeBob SquarePants episodes, and the opening sequence of King of the Hill. It has also been parodied in marketing campaigns and pornography, and by couples who recreate the image photographically by facing a camera in the same way, one of them holding a pitchfork or other object in its place. The painting famously appears in the opening titles of the television show Desperate Housewives (2004–2012). In 2023, Google released a commercial for their smartphone depicting a father and daughter recreating the scene at the original house. It also includes similar poses in numerous other settings, including in wet suits, dressed as skeletons, camping and in ski suits.