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 :. | Street | The church of Paris | The day have fog | Anerican Gothic (mk09) | The Stone of Wall |
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WERFF, Pieter van der
Dutch painter (b. 1665, Kralingen, d. 1722, Rotterdam)
Elizabeth Jane Gardner
(October 4, 1837-January 28, 1922) was an American academic and salon painter, who was born in Exeter, New Hampshire. She was an American expatriate who died in Paris where she had lived most of her life. She studied in Paris under the figurative painter Hugues Merle (1823-1881), the well-known salon painter Jules Joseph Lefebvre (1836-1911), and finally under William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905). After Bouguereau's wife died, Gardner became his paramour and after the death of his mother, who bitterly opposed the union, she married him in 1896. She adopted his subjects, compositions and even his smooth facture, adopted them so successfully that some of her work might be mistaken for his. Gardner's best known work may be The Shepherd David Triumphant (1895), which shows the young shepherd with the lamb he has rescued. Among her other works were "Cinderella," "Cornelia and Her Jewels," "Corinne," "Fortune Teller," "Maud Muller," "Daphne and Chloe," "Ruth and Naomi," "The Farmer's Daughter," "The Breton Wedding," and some portraits.
LENS, Andries Cornelis
Flemish painter (b. 1739, Antwerpen, d. 1822, Bruxelles). Flemish painter and writer. He was the son of the flower painter Cornelis Lens (d after 1766) and studied first under Charles Ykens II (1719-53) and then under Balthazar Beschey. In 1756 he was awarded first prize at the Academie of Antwerp and in 1763 was appointed to the staff on the strength of his decoration (destr.) of the refectory of the Alexians at Lier. He also came to the attention of Charles Alexandre, Duke of Lorraine and Bar, Governor-General of the Netherlands