ANAMOSA, Iowa — The most famous painting by Iowa's most famous artist resides in, well, Illinois. The Art Institute of Chicago bought "American Gothic" in 1930 for $300 — the prize Grant Wood received for winning the bronze medal at the museum's annual Exhibition of American Paintings.
While his depiction of a stern-faced farmer and his spinster daughter (Wood's younger sister Nan Wood Graham and Byron McKeeby, a Cedar Rapids dentist, posed for the portrait) is Wood's most recognized and most parodied painting, it is by no means a one-shot wonder.
During a weekend tour of this patch of eastern Iowa, three of my adult nieces and I saw dozens of witty creations and voluptuous landscapes by Wood, an "artist in overalls" who led the Regionalist art movement and whose works inspired by the dirt-poor Midwest were purchased by the rich and famous, including Katharine Hepburn and Cole Porter.
The "girls" and I checked into the Shaw House bed-and-breakfast, an Italianate mansion on an Anamosa hilltop. It was built by a former Civil War colonel in 1872, 19 years before Wood was born to a nearby family of Quaker farmers. Wood attended the one-room Antioch schoolhouse, which still stands just east of town on Iowa Highway 64, from 1898-1901. The building was last used as a school in 1959, the land around it is now called Grant Wood Memorial Park and a nearby building houses exhibits by other area artists. (Weekend tours can be arranged by writing to Margaret Brown, 204 N. Huber, Anamosa, IA 52205.) Arriving on a Saturday, we set out to search for some nightlife in nearby Stone City, site of the artist colony founded by Wood in 1932 and subject of his 1930 oil "Stone City." (Wood converted an 1890 stone mansion into a dormitory and studios. It later reverted to being a privately owned home. Writer Paul Engle lived there when a fire in 1963 destroyed much of it.) We could still see a stone barn from 1889 and a stone church with an Italian marble altar and stained glass from Munich, Germany. But we couldn't see the painting "Stone City" on this trip — it's in the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha.
Stone City is host to an annual Grant Wood Art Festival, held the second Sunday in June.
Tucked between some resale shops in Anamosa is the Grant Wood Tourism Center and Gallery.
That afternoon we decided to do something Wood and his widowed mother also did: pull up stakes and move 25 miles west to Cedar Rapids. Wood spent most of his life there, graduating from Washington High School and teaching art at Jackson Junior High and McKinley High School. (He also was an instructor at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, 20 miles to the south.)
Author William L. Shirer ("Rise and Fall of the Third Reich") was one of his childhood buddies. So was David Turner, whose family established a mortuary in a stately colonial home in the center of town. In later years, Turner hired Wood to decorate the mansion. Impressed by Wood's talent, but surprised by his apparent disinterest in making any money off his paintings, Turner took Wood under his wing, suggesting he set up a studio in a hayloft in the mortuary's stable.
Wood lived there from 1924 to 1934, and today No. 5 Turner Alley is on the National Register of Historic places.
At Turner's death, his extensive collection of Wood's early works was given to the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art. There we viewed a collection that includes several paintings Wood created in Paris during the 1920s as well as Wood's final work, 1941's "Spring in the Country," a painting of a woman hoeing and a small boy planting cabbages.
Cedar Rapids' Coe College is a great place to see Wood's work in a pleasant, peaceful setting. While the fresh-faced students studied at the college's Stewart Memorial Library, I perused some 20 pieces by Wood, including a pencil, charcoal and chalk sketch of "Daughters of Revolution." (The eventual oil painting, once owned by the actor Edward G. Robinson and depicting three pursed-lipped women, hangs in Cleveland.)
Next I ventured just a few blocks from the library to the Veterans Memorial Building to see the 20- by 24-foot stained glass window Wood designed to honor "the sacred memory of the men and women who gave their lives in defense of our country." Wood used glass made in Munich and supervised the window's installation.
We found still more Wood lore at The History Center, the year-old Linn County Historical Society museum. Curator Marise McDermott showed us a photo of Wood and others holding a bison horn found on a dig near rural Waubeek on the Waspsipinicon River. There's also his easel and a fringed, green and peach flowered easy chair with matching footstool, both designed by Wood and sold by the local furniture vendor Smulekoffs for $52.
For my nieces and I, our final stop was back in Anamosa where Wood — who died of cancer in 1942, two hours short of his 51st birthday — is buried in the appropriately hilly, verdant Riverside Cemetery. Look for the family plot marked by a large stone lion.