This is one of the most famous paintings in America, and almost everything you assume about the two people standing in it is wrong... The painting is American Gothic, made by Grant Wood in 1930, and it hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago. It actually began with the house: Wood spotted a small white farmhouse in Eldon, Iowa, with a pointed Gothic window set into its upper floor, the kind of refined, churchlike window you would expect on a cathedral, not a plain country home. He decided to paint it, and then, in his words, "the kind of people I fancied should live in that house." The man with the pitchfork was Wood's own dentist, Dr. Byron McKeeby. The woman was Wood's sister, Nan. And here is the detail most people get wrong: they are not husband and wife. Wood always insisted the pair were a father and his grown daughter. Nan, embarrassed to be seen as the wife of a man twice her age, spent years correcting people on exactly this point. When it was first shown, the people it seemed to portray were furious. Iowans took it as an insult, a mocking picture of joyless country folk, and one farmwife reportedly said Wood ought to have his head bashed in. But he swore there was no ridicule in it. He only wanted to paint the people he had known all his life, the stoic dignity of the rural Midwest, with honesty rather than contempt. He had trained in Paris and come home seeing his own place with new eyes. As he put it: "I had to go to France to appreciate Iowa." Then history took the meaning out of his hands, and that’s what i love about art: it takes on a life of its own. As the Great Depression deepened, a hungry and frightened country looked at these two faces and no longer saw mockery. It saw survival. The pitchfork, the plain clothes, the refusal to bend, all of it became a portrait of the American spirit holding the line while everything else collapsed...