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The couple posed so carefully in the painting are Wood’s sister Nan and B. H. McKeeby, the family dentist from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The period dress of each dates from the 1890s. She wears an apron over a black dress with a white collar and a cameo brooch of a goddess at the neck. He wears a stud-fastened collarless shirt, overalls, and a black jacket. Of course, he is also holding a pitchfork, and that is undoubtedly the key symbol in the picture. After all, she is not his wife, but rather the proverbial father’s daughter, and the pitchfork, while symbolizing Satan’s chief tool for sending sinners into the fiery pits of Hell, it is also useful for working with hay on the far and for warding off any unwanted suitors after his daughter’s virtue (notice how the Gothic window in the gable of the farmhouse looks more like what you would expect to find on a church). Of course, this assumes that they are not husband and wife, which opens up a different line of interpretation having to do with how married couples start to look like each other, but I must profess a preference for the “Farmer’s Daughter” approach.

Wood intended for the title “American Gothic” to represent a visual pun, since the pointed arch of the gable window is replicated in the three-pronged pitchfork as well as in the man’s face, the bib of his overalls, and the lines of his shirt. Wood was struck by the contrast of the small, modest frame house with its “pretentious” Gothic-style window (apparently the window came as a kit out of a Sears Roebuck catalogue). He originally sketched the house on the back of an envelope and then used it for the background of his most famous painting. The house itself is in the town of Eldon in southern Iowa (near Ottumwa) and was placed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. In 1991 it was donated to the State Historical Society and while the house is not open to the public, tourists can pose in front of it and have their picture taken in the famous pose (I bet they have a pitchfork you can use). There is also a replica of it near Stone City, which is where Wood oversaw the Stone City Art Colony during the summers of 1932-1933 and where an annual Grant Wood Art Festival is now held.

“American Gothic” is a powerful painting for the simple reason that it has it both ways. You can consider it to be celebrating the American virtues of patriarchy, sobriety, and moral vigilance, or you can read it as mocking those same virtues instead. Your viewpoint probably corresponds to how far you are removed, both geographically and culturally, from the American heartland. A self-taught painter who was devoted to the state of Iowa, Wood’s early work represented carefully rendered landscapes of fields of corn waving in the wind, which are decidedly different from “American Gothic.” The original oil on beaver-board painting measures 29 1/4 x 24 1/2 and has been on part of the Friends of American Art Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago since 1930 when it won an award at the Chicago art exhibit. The 18 x 22.5 inch image on this fine-art print is approximately two-thirds of the size of the original, which is a pretty good size reproduction.

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This tiny treasure is for all hominids young and old, single and divorced, sane and insane, smokers and non-smokers, and for all others who refuse to be labeled.

Again, Peter Neumeyer and Edward Gorey prove that plain text and black & white illustrations can be every bit as delightful as the complex and the colorful.