The Good Influence

In 1930 Grant Wood painted his most famous work, the double portrait, American Gothic," and instantly gained national recognition as a leader of the regionalist school. Trained as a painter at the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Académie Julian in Paris, Wood returned to his native Iowa where he taught art in the public schools of Cedar Rapids from 1919 to 1924, and subsequently as artist-in-residence at the University of Iowa from 1935 to 1942. His visions of the American heartland are stylized landscapes and penetrating portraits combining both irony and realism. In 1936, New York publisher George Macy proposed a special edition of Sinclair Lewis's signature book, "Main Street," illustrated by Wood to be offered by his Limited Editions Club. Wood produced nine illustrations including "The Good Influence." Lewis's character Mrs. Bogart is brilliantly satirized in Wood's depiction of a fashionable widow, an upstanding icon of her Midwestern community, prominently posed in front of the straight-edged architecture of her Baptist church. Yet her face, with its calculating eyes and self-satisfied smile, reveals her truer nature as a sanctimonious gossip and morality judge of her town. Wood's model for this drawing was Mrs. Mollie Green, hostess at Iowa City's leading hotel.