Grant Wood’s "American Gothic" shows a stern, unsmiling man and woman standing in front of a small white farmhouse with a pointed Gothic window. The man, thin with wire-rimmed glasses, grips a three-pronged pitchfork making him to be a farmer. Beside him, the woman has her lips pressed tight. Their dark, old-fashioned clothes and rigid posture make them look as if they’ve stepped out of a 19th-century tintype, frozen in place. The painting has become an icon of American regionalism.
