♪♪ [Kohlsdorf] Pull into Jones County and there is no question you've entered Grant Wood country.

♪♪ [Kohlsdorf] Look in any direction to see a Grant Wood painting come to life.

♪♪ [Kohlsdorf] Learn more about this influential artist on Anamosa's Main Street at the Grant Wood Art Gallery.

♪♪ [Brad Hatcher] Grant Wood was born about three and a half miles east of here on a small farm.

♪♪ [Brad Hatcher] And lived here for the first ten years of his life until his father died and then his mother and sister moved to Cedar Rapids.

He got his first schooling here at the Antioch Church.

He loved this area because of its landscaping and that kind of stuff.

♪♪ [Kohlsdorf] Born in 1891, Grant Wood was a pioneer in the regionalist art movement of the 1930s.

His dream-like paintings celebrated themes of manual labor and pastoral beauty at a time when rural America had been devastated by the Great Depression.

Wood studied art in Minneapolis and Chicago and he made his living as a teacher.

He served in World War I and, like other artists of his generation, he went to Europe in search of inspiration.

But he would find his artistic voice in coming home.

[Brad Hatcher] He just came back to what he loved and that was this area and so that is what he painted.

One of his quotes was, the best ideas he ever got was sitting underneath a cow milking it.

And he believed that there could be great art by people just painting what they knew.

♪♪ ♪♪ [Kohlsdorf] Wood drew from his own environment in 1930 to create the quintessential regionalist painting American Gothic.

♪♪ [Kohlsdorf] Inspired by an Eldon, Iowa farmhouse featuring a unique gothic window, the artist recruited his sister and a local dentist to model as farmers in the painting's foreground.

A pitch fork propped between them completes the scene.

The iconic image struck a chord as a symbol of rural stoicism in the face of the Depression.

It would become one of the best-known artistic works of the 20th century.

[Brad Hatcher] When I was a bus tour guide, we'd get a lot of people from all over the country.

When I would tell them about Grant Wood was born here and lived here most of his life, if I'd get a blank look, I would just hold up the American Gothic picture above it and everybody would go oh, that's who we're talking about.

I've been told that it's the second most recognizable painting in the world behind Mona Lisa.

♪♪ [Kohlsdorf] The Grant Wood Art Gallery offers a comprehensive look at the painter's career and insights on his local inspirations, including neighboring Stone City with its patented limestone structures, a perilous highway bend on the edge of town, and a tribute to ag innovation in nearby Viola.

♪♪ [Brad Hatcher] He was able to touch something personal in everybody with the harvest dinners and working in the gardens and that kind of stuff.

That was things that you grew up with.

He was able to touch something that everyone recognized.

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