Image size of print is 20 X 27 1/2 inches

PARSON WEEMS FABLE by Grant Wood (American 1892-1941)

Grant Wood was the quiet philosopher-artist of the Regionalist triumvirate, along with Missourian Thomas Hart Benton and Kansan John Steuart Curry. An ardent promoter of humble, hometown values, Wood was born to Quaker parents on a small farm near Anamosa, Iowa; this experience would be the basis of his iconic images of small-town plain folk and verdant Midwestern vistas.

First trained in Minneapolis and Chicago art schools, his early works were outdoor scenes combining a bright Fauve palette and a loose, impressionistic style - the result of a 1923-24 trip to Italy and Paris, which included study at the Academie Julian. However, Wood was by nature a meticulous craftsman, and found greater inspiration abroad in the clear, miniaturist detail of fifteenth-century Flemish masters, such as Hans Memling, and at home in the porcelain designs of Willow Ware.

From about 1928 until his death, Wood developed a stylized, hard-edged realism perfectly blended with his observant and sometimes wry characterizations of rural life. His accessible, representational paintings showed reassuring American subjects tied to enduring myths about the perfection of agrarian life. Intentionally aimed at an isolationist-minded, Depression-era audience, Wood's work found in the local scene a means of expressing nationalistic sentiment.

The fantastical Stone City, Iowa was Wood's first major landscape, painted in the same year as the famous American Gothic. At the height of his style, Stone City is also the epitome of Wood's dialogue about change that was often threaded through his traditional subjects. Understood in this tranquil, idealized scene of life in harmony with nature was the knowledge that Stone City itself reflected the transitions brought about in a rural community by industrialization. Located on the Wapsipinicon River twenty-six miles from Cedar Rapids, Stone City was a boom town gone bust: built on the success of its limestone quarries and laid to rest by the introduction of Portland cement. The land, Wood seems to suggest, has gone back to a purer purpose of grazing animals and growing crops. Wood's interest in this village continued to grow, and it became the site of a summer artist's colony which he ran in 1932 and 1933.

This Folk Art Print shows a young George Washington holding a Hatchet being confronted by his Father.

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