American Gothic

A stern, bespectacled farmer grips a pitchfork beside a tight-lipped woman, the two standing rigidly before a white farmhouse with a pointed Gothic window. Grant Wood used his sister and his dentist as models for this image of rural Midwestern rectitude, rendered with crisp, almost archaic precision. Now in the Art Institute of Chicago, American Gothic is among the most famous and most parodied of all American paintings - its meaning forever debated, hovering between earnest tribute to heartland virtue and sly satire of small-town narrowness, the unsmiling pair an enduring national icon.