Haying

The Iowa painter Grant Wood, along with John Steuart Curry (American, 1897 - 1946) and Thomas Hart Benton (American, 1889 - 1975), was one of the leading midwestern American regionalist painters. Created in 1939, just as the country was beginning to recover from the ravages of the Great Depression, Haying and its companion New Road are representative examples of the idealized landscapes of rural Iowa that the artist had begun to paint in 1930. They show no trace of the severe economic problems and natural disasters that had beset Iowa farmers for almost a decade. Using a detailed, deliberately naïve style, such works typically include the cultivated lands, farms, manual farm machinery, windmill...