Art Minute: Happy Birthday GRANT WOOD!

Grant Wood (February 13, 1891 – February 12, 1942) was an American painter, born in Anamosa, Iowa. He is best known for his paintings depicting the rural American Midwest, particularly the painting American Gothic, an iconic image of the 20th century.

Wood painted American scenes and subjects during the first half of the 20th century in a simplified style reminiscent of American folk art. Like poet Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, Wood wished to tell and preserve stories of the American Revolution.

The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere

Grant Wood, 1931
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

‎".....A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo forevermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beat of that steed,
And the midnight-message of Paul Revere."

From the poem, The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1860

Longfellow wrote his poem 88 years after the event when he found letters belonging to his grandfather, who had known Revere. Only a few people who had been children during the Revolution were still alive in 1860 when he wrote Paul Revere's Ride. Wood based his 1931 painting on Longfellow's heroic poem with no attempt to make it historically accurate.