Who painted American Gothic?

Grant Wood, in 1930, and the pair are not a farmer and his wife - they are meant as a farmer and his daughter, modelled by Wood's dentist and his own sister Nan, who was thirty and reportedly unhappy about being painted as a woman married to a man of that age.

The house is real, in Eldon, Iowa, and Wood was drawn to it by the window - a Gothic Revival pointed arch on a small wooden farmhouse, which he found pretentious for the building and interesting for it. He sketched it on an envelope and then painted the people he imagined would live there.

Whether it is satire has been argued since it was exhibited. Iowans at the time were furious, taking it as a caricature of rural Midwesterners as grim and rigid; Wood insisted it was affectionate and that he was painting people he admired. He also said different things at different times, and the ambiguity is much of why it works. It arrived at the start of the Depression and was read as a portrait of American endurance, which was probably not the intention either.