Grant Wood was born near Anamosa, Iowa on February 13, 1891. He lived on a farm until age ten, when his father died, after which his mother moved the family to Cedar Rapids. He studied at the Minneapolis School of Design and Handicraft, and later the Art Institute of Chicago. Wood was drafted into the Army in 1917, and was stationed at Camp Dodge near Des Moines, where he painted portraits of officers and enlisted men. He taught art in the Cedar Rapids schools from 1919 until 1925.

In 1920 Grant Wood studied at the Julian Academy in Paris. It was during this decade that his famous painting style began to emerge. He was in Munich in 1928 to direct the building of a stained glass window for the Cedar Rapids Memorial Coliseum, and returned to Iowa with a desire to paint in his own realistic style rather than the romantic art style of the time. Wood's unique style was immediately popular, and most of his famous Regionalist paintings were created during the 1930s. During the early 1930s, Wood established an art colony in Stone City, near Cedar Rapids. In 1934 he joined the faculty at the University of Iowa, in the Department of Graphic and Plastic Arts, as associate professor, and became full professor in 1939. He married Sara Maxon in March 1935, and they divorced in September 1939. Grant Wood died of cancer at the University Hospital in Iowa City one day before his 51st birthday, February 12, 1942.

[D. Anderson; 03/2007]