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 :. | The Path intersect the Garden | Spring is in | Make into Hay | Spring in Town | The Sweater of Plaid |
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Jean Marc Nattier
1685-1766 French Jean Marc Nattier Gallery Brother of Jean-Baptiste Nattier. As well as being taught by his father, he trained with his godfather, Jean Jouvenet, and attended the drawing classes of the Academie Royale, where in 1700 he won the Premier Prix de Dessin. From around 1703 he worked on La Galerie du Palais du Luxembourg. The experience of copying the work of Rubens does not, however, seem to have had a liberating effect on his draughtsmanship, which was described by the 18th-century collector Pierre-Jean Mariette as cold. Nattier was commissioned to make further drawings for engravers in the early part of his career, including those after Hyacinthe Rigaud famous state portrait of Louis XIV (1701; Paris, Louvre) in 1710, which indicates that he had established a reputation while he was still quite young. Although he was offered a place at the Academie de France in Rome on the recommendation of Jouvenet, Nattier preferred to remain in Paris and further his career. In 1717 he nevertheless made a trip to Holland, where he painted portraits of Peter the Great and the Empress Catherine (St Petersburg, Hermitage). The Tsar offered Nattier work at the Russian court, but the artist declined the offer. He remained in Paris for the rest of his life.
Balthasar van der Ast
(1593/94 - 1657) was a Dutch Golden Age painter who specialized in still lifes of flowers and fruit, as well as painting a number of remarkable shell still lifes; he is considered to be a pioneer in the genre of shell painting. His still lifes often contain insects and lizards. He was born in Middelburg and died at Delft.
Steven van der Meulen
(b. eAntwerp - d. London, e1563-64) was a Dutch artist active c. 1543-1564. He gained prominence in England in the first decade of the reign of Elizabeth I as one of many Flemish artists active at the Tudor court. He is best known for the "Barrington Park" portrait type of Elizabeth I and for three-quarter length portraits of members of the English court in the first half of the 1560s. A recently discovered will indicates that he died in London between October 1563 and January 1564.