To mark Thanksgiving Day this week’s picture is American Gothic, by Grant Wood: the archteypal image of watchful Protestant farmers living the frontier life, which seems to become steadily more famous as the world which it describes becomes steadily more remote. It is the one picture by an American artist which every American knows, in reproduction if not in reality; and it is difficult to think of any other painting except the Mona Lisa to have generated more pastiches of itself. Robert Hughes’s book American Visions contains an amusing inventory of the myriad variations played on it by cartoonists and advertising agencies. The couple in front of the simple, wooden-frame house with the Gothic window in the gable have been reinvented as “preppies, yuppies, hippies, Weathermen, pot growers, Ku Kluxers, jocks, operagoers, the Johnsons, the Reagans, the Carters, the Fords, the Nixons, the Clintons, and George Wallace with an elderly black lady…” The list goes on.

Wood never imagined that a painting submitted more in hope than expectation to the juried annual open exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1930 (winning the Norman Wait Harris Bronze Medal and a prize of $300) would end up conferring on him a kind of immortality. He had not set out to create one of the most famous pictures in the world, but a painted equivalent of the tintype snapshots in his family album. During the late nineteenth century, frontiersmen often had themselves photographed in front of their homesteads. Harking back to such images, Wood was preserving the memory of the kind of people among whom he had spent his own childhood in Iowa in the 1890s. He wanted to resuscitate the past – his past – in living colour; and perhaps to have a little fun with it at the...

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