In the work "American Gothic", Wood wanted to depict the traditional roles of men and women in the Midwest and created the work in a curious way. In 1930, while driving through the town of Eldon, in the state of Iowa, Grant Wood was struck by the sight of a small house painted white, in the Carpenter Gothic style. So the painter, an icon of American artistic regionalism, with his landscapes steeped in childhood memories and the rural American context, decided to capture that building in an oil painting with "the kind of people he would have imagined as its inhabitants".
So he chose the models he was most familiar with: his sister Nan wore a colonial dress similar to those of 19th-century American tradition, while his dentist wore the clothes of a farmer.
Yet there is still something that eludes us about this much celebrated and mysterious work, an ambiguity made so, in the title, by the reference to "Gothic" and which invites the viewer to go beyond the apparent simplicity of an everyday scene to grasp a meaning that goes far beyond.
