Grant Wood is considered by many scholars, curators and collectors to be the father of American Regionalism. The style features country scenes and subjects and returns to figurative art when European Modernism and the Parisian Avant-Garde were taking hold. The sitter in the present work is Wood’s sister, Nan, who served as a model for Wood, appearing in several works, including Wood’s most famous painting, American Gothic, in the Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. 

Few Grant Wood works of this complexity and importance have ever appeared outside of museum collections, let alone offered for sale. This portrait is one of the most significant paintings within Wood’s oeuvre. The esteemed Grant Wood scholar, Dr. Henry Adams, stated, Portrait of Nan is “one of the last major works by Grant Wood in private hands”.

Portrait of Nan was in the collection of the artist until his death and is also the only painting he kept- and the only painting in his home, having gone so far as to pick out the furnishings and rug to complement the painting as it hung in his Iowa City living room.  

Dr. Henry Adams describes this painting as “a pendant to his most famous painting, American Gothic of 1930″. Adams further speculates that Portrait of Nan was meant to rectify Nan’s public image after American Gothic painted the year before, which had become famous and in so doing, had insinuated a (false) extramarital relationship between the two subjects (Nan and their family dentist).

Portrait of Nan is the artist’s last portrait from his early period, the endcap to the period in which he created Woman with Plants and American Gothic. After 1930, the artist only created a few paintings a year, making finished oil paintings of any subject a true rarity.  

The styling of this portrait is a fusion between contemporary (at the time) and 19th-century American portraiture: “portrait’s heavy framing curtain, stark background, oval format [of portraits favored in the colonial and Victoria eras], and Federal-era chair evoke many of the formal elements found in nineteenth-century American folk painting”

Grant Wood’s paintings from this period were influenced by his recent trip to Europe and the Northern Renaissance art he saw there in 1930 when he moved from his youth’s academic/impressionist style and developed his mature style that celebrated Midwestern subjects. The present painting has been extensively exhibited, including a 2018 show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York: Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables .