Wood came to paint the picture in his late thirties, having, in his twenties, spent some time studying painting in Paris, the centre of avant-garde art, and in Munich. Having become familiar with modern painting, he himself had painted in an Impressionist manner, but on his return to the Midwest he was soon to reject all he had seen and learned. He would adopt the detailed, realist style of 15th-Century Flemish painter Van Eyck, and he would embrace Regionalism, but with his own character-driven twist. Despite going back to earlier European traditions, Wood really felt that what he and the Regionalists were doing was finally liberating American art from cultural colonialism, which is something only the later Abstract Expressionists, who embraced modernism full-tilt, would be championed for doing. American Gothic has become an American icon, but Regionalism itself would never be thought of as a significant movement in the canon of US art history.

Wood must have learnt all about plein-air painting in Paris, but the couple in American Gothic were painted separately, and neither sitter was painted in front of the house. The farmer, as you might have already guessed, isn’t actually a farmer, but a certain Dr Bryon McKeeby, a well-to-do dentist from Cedar Rapids, where Wood lived with his mother and sister. The couple’s clothing too has been carefully handpicked by the artist, and the woman’s dress is distinctly old-fashioned, so the first viewers of the painting would have quickly noted the air of nostalgia – though, with the painting’s hard lines and surfaces, there’s little accompanying sentimentality.