Image 16
The Birthplace of Herbert Hoover,
West Branch, Iowa
1931
Grant Wood
United States (1891-1942)
Oil on composition board
29 5/8 x 39 3/4 inches
The John R. Van Derlip Fund 81.105; owned jointly with the Des Moines Art Center

• The notion that anyone can grow up to become president is one of the United States' most beloved and enduring myths.
• Herbert Hoover rose from humble beginnings in a small midwestern town to become the 31st president of the United States.
• The precise LINEAR PATTERNS and close attention to details in this painting are hallmarks of Grant Wood's REGIONALIST style.

Herbert Clark Hoover was born in 1874 in West Branch, Iowa. He lived with his parents and two siblings in a small cottage. Herbert's parents died - his father from typhoid fever and his mother from pneumonia - when he was very young. In 1884, 10-year-old "Bertie" moved to Oregon to live with his uncle, a country doctor. At 17, he entered Stanford University, from which he graduated with a degree in engineering.

Hoover became a very successful mining engineer, making his fortune operating mines in San Francisco, England, Australia, and China. When World War I broke out, Hoover established the American Relief Committee in London at the request of the United States government, helping more than 100,000 Americans to escape war-torn Europe. Later he chaired the Commission for Relief in Belgium and served as the United States Food Administrator. After the war, he created the American Relief Administration, administering more than 100 million dollars for clothing and food for oppressed Europeans and Russians recovering from German occupation. When government funds for that program ran out, Hoover secured private contributions to keep it going.

Hoover's dedication to relief efforts made him a hero. Both political parties wanted him to become their presidential candidate. He ran for a time in the 1928 Democratic primaries, but was ultimately victorious as a Republican candidate. Recognizing the political advantage of his popular rags-to-riches story, Hoover kicked off his campaign with a big public rally in his rural hometown. In 1929 the poor orphan boy from Iowa became president of the United States.

Grant Wood
The artist Grant Wood is something of a legend himself, another small-town Iowa boy made good. Wood studied art in Europe for several years but returned to the United States in the 1920s. Dissatisfied with modern painting styles, he developed his own style inspired by the brilliant colors and tiny details of 15th-century Flemish paintings.

Responding to a resurgence of nationalism and a new fascination with the American past, Wood painted many GENRE scenes of historical and regional interest, including farmhouses, small-town folk, and the rural landscape. He and other midwestern artists who painted scenes of Americana were called Regionalists. Wood emphasized description and narrative in the same way as the contemporary American writers he admired. Like Sinclair Lewis, he raised ordinary experiences of daily life to mythical proportions.

The Birthplace of Herbert Hoover, West Branch, Iowa
Wood places the viewer at the crest of a steep hill, looking down into a green valley where a tour guide points to a small cottage beside a larger white house. But this is not an ordinary cottage - it is the place where Herbert Hoover was born.

Warm midwestern sunshine illuminates the large family homes, neatly mown lawns, and perfectly clipped trees in the quiet neighborhood surrounding the cottage. A gentle breeze blows laundry hanging near the cottage. In the front, three orange birds fly over a clear blue stream. Beyond them, toylike chickens peck around logs leaning against a red barn, and even farther back, two boys in overalls chat on the sidewalk. A road runs between rows of shade trees on the right, and a golden field, dotted with haystacks, extends beyond the houses on the left.

Typical of Grant Wood's Regionalist style, everything is neat and regimented, evoking the simplified forms of American folk art. Forms, such as the solid, rounded trees and boxlike houses, are reduced to GEOMETRIC shapes. Many tiny straight brushstrokes define the trim lawns, creating a rhythmic pattern across much of the painting, and patterned clumps of enormous autumnal leaves define the trees. Unrealistically, all of the forms, whether close or distant, are bathed in the same clear light and described with the same precise detail.

Warm autumnal colors - browns, golds, oranges, and yellow-greens - dominate Wood's painting. The white siding of the cottage and house create a striking contrast against the golden-green lawn.

Hoover's Birthplace
Wood did not re-create the scene as it may have looked at the president's birth. Instead he painted it as the tourist attraction it became. Upon Hoover's election to the presidency, the ordinary cottage, which had been turned into a kitchen by later owners, began to attract visitors from all over the country. The owner of the cottage charged visitors ten cents for tours of it and set up a souvenir stand. Wood included a sign in front of the house and a pink rock in which the Daughters of the American Revolution placed a plaque identifying the house as Hoover's birthplace.

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Discussion Questions

Look
1. Tell the story of Herbert Hoover. What part of the story do you see in Grant Wood's painting? (Herbert Hoover's birthplace.) Herbert Hoover was born in West Branch, Iowa, in 1874. What clues tell you that this painting shows Hoover's birthplace later on in his life? (The sign and tour guide suggest that Hoover had become famous by the time Grant Wood painted this.) Where are the visitors at this tourist attraction? Who is the tour guide pointing the way for? (You - the viewer of the painting!)

2. Grant Wood's STYLE can be compared to American folk art because of the way he simplified forms in his paintings. What forms did he simplify in this painting? (Trees and shrubs are solid round shapes rather than irregular as they are in nature, and the houses are boxlike.)

3. Grant Wood created PATTERN in his painting by repeating lines and forms. Where do you see repeated lines? (The leaves of the trees and shrubs are made up of regular repeated lines. The lawn is painted with tiny repeated lines.) Where do you see repeated forms that create pattern? (Tops of trees, tree trunks and shadows that line the road on the right, rounded forms of shrubs to the left of the bridge, haystacks in the BACKGROUND on the left.)

4. What time of year is it in Grant Wood's painting? (Late summer.) How can you tell? (Lush greens, some leaves beginning to turn fall colors.) What time of day is it? (Morning.) How can you tell? (Shadows indicate sun is at an angle. Bright light indicates sun is growing stronger rather than fading into evening sunset.)

5. Artists use several PERSPECTIVE techniques to give their work the illusion of depth. Which techniques did Grant Wood use? (Objects closest to the viewer appear larger. Objects far away appear smaller and closer to the horizon line [scale]; objects closest to the viewer overlap and partially hide objects in the distance [overlap]; objects recede along imaginary lines that meet at a "vanishing point" on the horizon line [linear PERSPECTIVE].) Which technique didn't he use? (Distant objects have less detail and muted gray-toned colors compared to objects close to the viewer [AERIAL PERSPECTIVE].)

6. Grant Wood was a GENRE painter. He was interested in painting scenes from everyday life in the midwestern United States. What is "everyday" about the scene in this painting? (Chickens in the yard, children playing, laundry hanging on the clothesline.) What is not "everyday?" (Tour guide and signage signify an extraordinary place; yard and road excessively neat and ordered.)

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Think
1. What popular American myth does Herbert Hoover's story exemplify? (Anyone can grow up to become president of the United States.) Do you think this myth holds true even today? Could a girl grow up to be president of the United States? Does a person's race play a part in his or her ability to achieve the presidency? Is it easier to become president if you are wealthy? Why or why not?

2. Grant Wood's painting of Herbert Hoover's humble beginnings shows how extraordinary things can happen to ordinary people. Can you think of other ordinary people in American history who were able to make extraordinary achievements? (Abraham Lincoln, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Amelia Earhart, George Washington Carver, Howard Hughes . . . the list is endless!)

3. Grant Wood was a member of a group of American painters called REGIONALISTS. These artists tried to show the distinctive characteristics of a region of the United States in their paintings. What particular characteristics of the American Midwest did Grant Wood include in his painting of Herbert Hoover's birthplace? (Flat rural landscape, wooden farm buildings, deciduous trees and changing seasons.) How would his painting look different if Herbert Hoover had been born in the southwest United States? In Colorado? In Florida?

4. Grant Wood and his contemporaries in American art in the 1930s and 1940s were interested in raising ordinary experiences of everyday life to mythic proportions. How did Grant Wood raise everyday life in the town of Herbert Hoover's birthplace to mythic proportions? (He made a painting about it!) Explain that before this particular period of American history, artists and writers did not consider daily life important enough to write about or represent in works of art. Can you think of other artists or writers you may have studied whose work focused on daily life? (Sinclair Lewis, Robert Frost, John Steinbeck, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Mark Twain, Edward Hopper, Thomas Hart Benton.)

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