1891-1942 Grant Wood Locations His family moved to Cedar Rapids after his father died in 1901. Soon thereafter he began as an apprentice in a local metal shop. After graduating from Washington High School (Cedar Rapids, Iowa) , Wood enrolled in an art school in Minneapolis in 1910, and returned a year later to teach in a one-room schoolhouse. In 1913 he enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and did some work as a silversmith. From 1920 to 1928 he made four trips to Europe, where he studied many styles of painting, especially impressionism and post-impressionism. But it was the work of Jan Van Eyck that influenced him to take on the clarity of this new technique and to incorporate it in his new works. From 1924 to 1935 Wood lived in the loft of a carriage house that he turned into his personal studio at "5 Turner Alley" (the studio had no address until Wood made one up himself). In 1932, Wood helped found the Stone City Art Colony near his hometown to help artists get through the Great Depression. He became a great proponent of regionalism in the arts, lecturing throughout the country on the topic. Wood taught painting at the University of Iowa's School of Art beginning in 1934. During that time, he supervised mural painting projects, mentored students, produced a variety of his own works, and became a key part of the University's cultural community. On February 12, 1942, one day before his 51st birthday, Wood died at the university hospital of liver cancer. When Wood died, his estate went to his sister, Nan Wood Graham, the woman portrayed in American Gothic. When she died in 1990, her estate, along with Wood's personal effects and various works of art, became the property of the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa. Wood was an active painter from an extremely young age until his death, and although he is best known for his paintings, he worked in a large number of media, including ink, charcoal, ceramics, metal, wood and found objects. Throughout his life he hired out his talents to many Iowa-based businesses as a steady source of income. This included painting advertisements, sketching rooms of a mortuary house for promotional flyers and, in one case, designing the corn-themed decor (including chandelier) for the dining room of a hotel. In addition, his 1928 trip to Munich was to oversee the making of the stained-glass windows he had designed for a Veterans Memorial Building in Cedar Rapids. He again returned to Cedar Rapids to teach Junior High students after serving in the army as a camouflage painter.  Related Paintings of Grant Wood :. | Supporter | Rose Ranch | American Gothic | Iowa View | Conduit |
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Lydia Field Emmet
(January 23, 1866 - August 16, 1952) was an American artist best known for her work as a portraitist. She studied with, among others, prominent artists such as William Merritt Chase, Henry Siddons Mowbray, Kenyon Cox and Tony Robert-Fleury. Emmet exhibited widely during her career, and her paintings can now be found hanging in the White House, and many prestigious art galleries, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Emmet was born on January 23, 1866, at New Rochelle, New York, the seventh of ten children born to merchant William Jenkins Emmet and illustrator Julia Colt Pierson.
James Tissot
French Painter, 1836-1902 French painter, printmaker and enamellist. He grew up in a port, an experience reflected in his later paintings set on board ship. He moved to Paris c. 1856 and became a pupil of Louis Lamothe and Hippolyte Flandrin. He made his Salon d?but in 1859 and continued to exhibit there successfully until he went to London in 1871. His early paintings exemplify Romantic obsessions with the Middle Ages, while works such as the Meeting of Faust and Marguerite (exh. Salon 1861; Paris. Mus. d'Orsay) and Marguerite at the Ramparts (1861; untraced, see Wentworth, 1984, pl. 8) show the influence of the Belgian painter Baron Henri Leys. In the mid-1860s Tissot abandoned these tendencies in favour of contemporary subjects, sometimes with a humorous intent, as in Two Sisters (exh. Salon 1864; Paris, Louvre) and Beating the Retreat in the Tuileries Gardens (exh. Salon 1868; priv. col., see Wentworth, 1984, pl. 45). The painting Young Ladies Looking at Japanese Objects (exh. Salon 1869; priv. col., see Wentworth, 1984, pl. 59) testifies to his interest in things Oriental, and Picnic (exh. Salon 1869; priv. col., see 1984 exh. cat., fig. 27), in which he delved into the period of the Directoire, is perhaps influenced by the Goncourt brothers. Tissot re-created the atmosphere of the 1790s by dressing his characters in historical costume.
Charles Howard Hodges
(1764, Portsmouth - July 24, Amsterdam), was a British painter active in the Netherlands during the French occupation of 18th and early 19th century. Charles Howard Hodges had visited Amsterdam in 1788; after a two-year stay in Dublin, he moved with his family to The Hague in 1792. In Amsterdam, he worked as an artist, specialized in the mezzotint technique and pastel. In 1797, he and his family moved to Amsterdam, where he lived with his teacher Johann Friedrich August Tischbein at the Prinsengracht Ne 205. There, he became a famous painter of portraits; he painted over 700 portraits of the rich and famous of that time. He was also an engraver, printer, art dealer and a member of the Amsterdam art club Felix Meritis. He is well-known for the fact that he painted all the leaders of the Netherlands during the Napoleonic Period, -a turbulent period in Dutch history, since the Netherlands went through 5 different political systems: stadtholder Willem V of the Republic of the United Netherlands, Grand Pensionary Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck of the Batavian Republic, King Louis Bonaparte (King of Holland), Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte and king William I of the Netherlands. The only known portrait of Sebald Justinus Brugmans was made by him. A design for the honorary cross of the Order of the Union was rejected by Louis Bonaparte. Hodges advised the Dutch government in 1815 with the return of thousands of works of art, which were confiscated by the French in 1795 from several collections, including the Gallery of Prince William V (the first museum open to the public in the Netherlands), and the several collections of the previous stadtholders. Not all the stolen art was returned from Paris, and it is said that several pieces are still held in the Louvre up to this day. Most of the over 700 portraits by Hodges are made in the early 19th century, the earlier works in pastel, and later work in oil paint. Several of these portraits can be found in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, in museums and castles and in royal and private collections. Charles Howard Hodges was father and teacher to James Newman Hodges, een lesser painter who worked in the Rijksmuseum when it was still located in the Trippenhuis in Amsterdam.