Spring in the Country

Grant Wood, an American artist during the great depression period, could not have presented rural America any better. He was enamored of his roots and sought to reflect that culture in the best way he knew how to; the paintbrush.

In pursuit of this, he brought forward several greatest classic masterpieces, some of which include: Spring in town, Daughters of Revolution, The Perfectionist, and The American Gothic, which he is most famous for. He reminded America that rural America was the essence of the being of that great country. He adopted regionalism alongside other artists like Thomas Benton and John Steuart as his artistic style to prove his patriotism to Small-town America and America as a whole.

In the painting, a woman is holding a hoe and is digging straight neat furrows marked by a garden twine. At her feet is a bucket with a ladle. The young boy kneeling next to her in faded blue overalls helps set the seedlings in the soil, and next to him is a basket holding the seedlings. Towards the edge of the hill, behind the blossoming apple tree, a man approaches with two plowing horses. A herd of cows is captured grazing in the neighboring fields. Next to the woman is a blossom; the wild prairie rose to the lower right. All this is captured under the blue skies with fluffy cotton-like clouds.

He created this piece in 1941, a year before he passed away after going on sabbatical in 1940 due to numerous conflicts with his colleagues at the University he worked in then. He set to show the simplicity and beauty of country life in his illustrations of the upcountry landscapes. He is meticulous with his brush strokes and how well he blends green, brown, and blue hues to represent the crops, earth, and blue skies, respectively. He brings the landscapes and characters to life.

He says on the Spring in Town that preceded Spring in the Country, "In making these paintings, I had in mind something which I hope to convey to a fairly wide audience in America- the picture of a country rich in the arts of peace; a homely, lovable nation infinite of any worthy sacrifice necessary to its preservation." He tapped into his childhood experiences and longing in the composition of this piece. The characters in this piece are believed to be a notion he had of his childhood, with his mother and father and free from any of his siblings. This beauty, framed of oil on canvas, is currently displayed at Cedar Rapids Museum of Art.