Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables | Art & Artists

The Anamosa, Iowa, chapter of the Freemasons, the world’s oldest and largest fraternal organization, commissioned Wood to make this allegorical triptych of the three levels of Freemasonry through which members advance in a prescribed path of study and rituals. Wood grounded his image in the Masonic legend of Hiram Abiff, chief architect of King Solomon’s Temple, whose murder by individuals attempting to extract a secret password from him underscores the importance in Freemasonry of fidelity and the certainty of death. 

From left to right, Wood illustrates the building of the temple, its completion, and its decay, setting within those panels auxiliary themes of man carving his own destiny, the equality of human beings, and the contemplation of life in old age. Wood modeled the statuary in the painting on The Builder by Czech-American artist Albin Polasek (1879–1965), Michelangelo’s David, and Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker.

Wood was hired by Cedar Rapids realtor Henry Ely to paint Adoration of the Home as an advertisement for the developer’s model homes. Drawing on the visual language of Renaissance altarpieces, Wood used local figures as models in this neoclassical allegory of Cedar Rapids’ growth and modernity. The central female figure, presented as a secular Madonna, symbolizes Cedar Rapids. Holding one of Ely’s model homes aloft as if it were a devotional object, she is surrounded by figures personifying religion and education. On either side of this trio are figures representing the prairie and the city. On the far right, Mercury, the god of commerce, raises his staff with one hand and cradles a bag of money in the other.

In 1927 Wood was awarded a commission to create a stained-glass window for Cedar Rapids’ planned Veterans Memorial Building honoring America’s war dead. He spent a year methodically researching the uniforms soldiers wore in the country’s six wars to date and making to scale drawings of each figure such as this one. After the city approved his sketch in early 1928, Wood hired Emil Frei Art Glass, a St. Louis company with a branch in Munich, to execute his design in stained glass. That fall, Wood traveled to Germany to supervise production. The experience of working with the hard-edge shapes and smooth surfaces of the stained glass rekindled a delight in craftsmanly exactitude that he had abandoned in adopting the loose brushwork of Impressionism; this revelation proved instrumental to the development of his mature art.