Grant Wood, a central figure in the “Regionalist Triumvirate” and best remembered for American Gothic (1930), painted Dinner for Threshers in 1934. Though often overlooked, the work is emblematic in its engagement with typological and social themes, as well as its nuanced representation of domesticity. Emerging during the Great Depression and shaped by a broader cultural project of emancipation, Regionalism sought to ground American identity in local realities. Wood’s painting enacts his own “Revolt Against the City” by anchoring its subjects in the rituals of rural life. While the farmhouse has traditionally been analyzed either in economic terms or through its architectural features, this paper shifts attention to its representational dimension, interpreting it in dialogue with Wood’s broader body of work—his images, writings, and housing experiments. The analysis offers a layered reading of the painting, presenting the sectioned interior as the stage of a domestic temple, where both architecture and human figures are abstracted and function as vessels of collective memory. Drawing on early Italian pictorial traditions, Wood transforms the harvest meal into a tableau rich in religious symbolism: humble, mass-produced utensils—borrowed from both childhood memory and mail-order catalogues—become ritual objects in their own right. The neighbors—those who took part in what Wood called “the most exciting event of each childhood year”—are arranged within a Carpenter Gothic scenography: a long cross-section that evokes a Last Supper staged at the dawn of the twentieth century. This elevation of the ordinary into the sacred reflects Wood’s effort to preserve the agrarian myth, transforming a pivotal moment into a pedagogical fresco amidst the wave of deruralization that, in the 1930s, was reshaping even his native Jones County, Iowa. The painting thus models a method for reading architectural representation through alternative media, showing how works beyond conventional drawing can yield deep architectural insight. Informed by Wood’s investigations into typology and supported by his wider oeuvre—from New Deal murals to “decorative adventures” in vernacular design—Dinner for Threshers appears not as a nostalgic tribute to a vanishing world, but as a structured response to the social and spatial pressures of twentieth-century urbanization. It positions domesticity as a framework for negotiating identity, territory, and inhabitation—offering a pointed contrast to the speculative housing proposals that increasingly dominated the expanding cityscape. Ultimately, the painting serves as a figurative manifesto against cultural and social homogenization. Through a combination of digital reconstruction and iconological and semiotic inquiry, the analysis reveals how each compositional decision contributes to the operative lexicon of a counter-discourse embedded in Wood’s artistic and political vision. His depiction of rural life offers a bottom-up perspective in which so-called minor domestic spaces embody a neglected material culture, reshaping our understanding of both artistic and architectural narratives.

DRAWING THE TYPE: REGIONALISM AS EMANCIPATION

I had to go to France to appreciate Iowa.

Grant Wood⁠

With this remark, Grant Wood acknowledged a paradox at the core of his artistic turn: only through the critical distance afforded by Europe could he fully recognized the aesthetic and cultural value of his native Midwest. During the 1920s, Wood embarked on a series of European sojourns that revolutionized not only his painterly grammar but, more significantly, his pictorial lexicon. In 1920, he travelled to Paris to practice en plein air. He returned several times over the next few years, enrolling at the Académie Julian, then continuing through Italy to study Mediterranean light, before getting back to France to paint boulevards, architectural details, and landscapes. His return to Cedar Rapids in 1924 marked a first act of domestic re-foundation: he relocated his studio to the rooms above the garage of Dave Turner’s funeral home—Turner being a devoted patron—and personally oversaw its furnishing and decoration, filtering Victorian taste through a rigorous artisanal lens.⁠ This engagement with manual craft was rooted in a foundational pedagogical trajectory: his work as “staff artist” at Washington High School, where he produced stage sets and decorations;⁠ the Craftsman Lessons; studying with Ernest Batchelder by correspondence; and training at the Minneapolis School of Design and Handicraft and Normal Art (1911).⁠ He worked briefly for Kalo Silversmiths in Chicago (1913–14), then opened his own silversmithing workshop (1914–16) before designing camouflage schemes for artillery during the Great War (1918).⁠ ⁠ In 1926, he went back to Paris to exhibit at Galerie Carmine. The show proved to be a partial failure: only a handful of the forty-six works were sold. Although the exhibition received praise from several established French critics, it failed to generate serious attention. Some visitors dismissed Wood as not being a true artist, while American critics—the audience to whom the show was ultimately addressed—remained entirely silent.⁠ In retrospect, Wood would describe this period with candor, admitting that he had spent years painting the wrong subjects in the wrong style—namely, the impressionist idiom that, even across the Atlantic, continued to define artistic legitimacy. Wood told the Chicago Tribune newspaper: “I spent twenty years wandering around the world hunting arty subjects to paint. I came back to Cedar Rapids, my hometown, and the first thing I noticed was the cross-stitched embroidery of my mother’s kitchen apron.”⁠ The following year, a commission from the City of Cedar Rapids offered him both recognition and a breakthrough: he was asked to design a large stained-glass window for the Veterans Memorial Building (1928) [Atlas 1, Fig. 3].

Wood entrusted its execution to the Bavarian craftsmen of Emil Frei and traveled to Munich in September to oversee its production.⁠ Scholars widely accept the autobiographical narrative the artist constructed around this event, recognizing it as a moment of epiphany. Watching the glaziers—accustomed to shaping the hieratic visages of Christs and saints—transform the faces of soldiers into medieval icons, as observed by James M. Dennis, Wood abstracted and depersonalized the models to achieve a deliberate “uniformity of expressionlessness.”⁠ Though retaining an anecdotal flavor, the six figures at the base of the Memorial Window present themselves as types. The central female figure—as seen in the preparatory sketch [Atlas 1, Fig. 1-4]—is modelled directly on the Madonna from Piero della Francesca’s Polyptych of the Misericordia.⁠ Symbolizing the Church as a whole and drawing on medieval iconography, she literally enfolds the community of the faithful in her monumental mantle. This episode marked not only the affirmation of a modus operandi in which classical references were employed as deliberate rhetorical devices, but also introduced Wood’s full appropriation of this legacy, through his reprise and transformation of Piero’s act of turning the human figure into an architectural subject. This is a role‑play he would later reverse, revisit, and refine throughout his typological investigations of the built environment. The works studied in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich and the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg—from the Late Gothic to the Northern Renaissance—combined with the magic realism of Neue Sachlichkeit, completed the metamorphosis.⁠ They prompted a return to measured verisimilitude, a practice in which line did not simply describe but actively enclosed the figure within a clearly defined frame, effectively aligning with the broader Return to Order that was sweeping through interwar Europe.⁠ At the same time, the familiar subjects he chose were no longer treated as incidental details. Instead, they became visual anchors, gateways, for a broader symbolic system, one that expressed shared cultural values and a renewed vision of the American inland regions. From these two aspects emerged a clear synthesis of Wood’s personal articulation of American Regionalism, the very framework through which his work would later be understood.⁠ His encounter with “those German primitives who locate the Gospel among half-timbered houses and Northern landscapes” marked, first and foremost, a shift in perception.⁠ The idea that the sacred might be embedded in the everyday accompanied him back to Iowa, where he began to see the familiar in a newly heightened way. The impassive faces of farmers, the carefully cultivated fields, the modest and functional objects of rural life no longer appeared as background detail—they became signs: material expressions of a quiet, underlying ethical order, and thus became paintable. The human figure, once treated as an individual subject, became a bearer of collective meaning. Painting no longer simply represented what was visible; it reconstructed a symbolic world by reinterpreting reality that then acquired meaning.⁠ And it is in considering this inflection that his greatest success must also be observed. Already in the early pencil sketch for American Gothic (1930) [Atlas 1, Fig.8], the features of his sister, Nan, are elongated [Atlas 1, Fig.15]—a process that extends to the second figure, the dentist Byron McKeeby, as well as to the façade itself, which in the final painting assumes proportions more truly Gothic than those of its real-life counterpart. The initial oil-and-watercolor sketch [Atlas 1, Fig.7] functioned as a medium for capturing impressions gathered on site. Yet it is through drawing that Wood enacts the necessary transformation—turning the Dibble House (built in 1881) [Atlas 1, Fig.6], observed during a visit to Eldon, into the archetypal home of “any” American:

Any northern town old enough to have some building dating back to the Civil War is liable to have a house or a church in the American Gothic style. I simply invented some American-Gothic people to stand in front of a house of this type. […] It was my intention later to do a Mission bungalow painting as a companion piece, with Mission bungalow types standing in front of it. The accent then, of course, would be put on the horizontal instead of the vertical. The people in American Gothic are not farmers but are smalltown, as the shirt on the man indicates. They are American, however, and it is unfair to localize them as Iowa.⁠

In this passage, Wood used the terms style and type with little distinction, yet a subtle shift emerges toward a deliberate process of abstraction—one in which architecture serves as a matrix of identity, and the human figure adopts its correspondent character as a social and cultural type. Through drawing, the architecture of the American Gothic house begins to shed its phenomenal condition as an isolated episode and is converted into a stratified organism capable of incorporating collective intuition and the imprint of a specific historical environment, thus reflecting the entire narrative of a tradition.⁠ The building type represented is woven into the genetic code of rural communities and serves as the custodian of a spontaneous, unified, and synthetic consciousness. Years later, Wood would again invoke the term type to distinguish between two ways of being a portrait painter. By granting equal scenic dignity to faces and façades and by using the term to describe not only the architecture of the house but also the people standing before it, it is not far-fetched to extend his work of characterization to a third—and arguably the true—protagonist of the work. In “the Writer and the Painter” (1935), Wood identified two kinds of portraitists: “The other kind [of portrait painter] has to acquaint himself profoundly with his subject, or have a personal knowledge of him as a type… This second kind of painter puts a whole philosophy into his picture, not just a set of features and a complexion. His work has depth.”⁠ To mediate sensory perception through thought, and ultimately to place the subject within a typological category, is a process that enables the artist to universalize their message and, in turn, to engage with the audience on a deeper level. The typological inquiry into portraiture, which frees itself from the logic of individual patronage, becomes instead a discourse addressed to the American public at large.⁠ Even when engaging with the medium of writing in his unfinished autobiography Return from Bohemia, Wood sketched the people of Anamosa as types: the father represents the archetypal farmer, the aunts are the classic Victorian old maids, and so on.⁠ To adopt the concept of type—whether architectural or human—implied, for Wood, a dual operation: the abstraction of empirical data and the restitution of a container of meaning shared with the recipients of his message. In American Gothic, the American public is confronted with two typical American people standing before a typical American house, which for Wood coincided with the Carpenter Gothic type.

CARPENTER GOTHIC SURVIVAL: TOWARD AN OPERATIVE LEXICON

The so-called carpenter gothic is a mid-nineteenth-century American adaptation of Gothic Revival, characterized by decorative motifs such as turrets and pointed arches applied to domestic buildings—often with little structural or spatial coherence.⁠ It is essential to recognize that the movement mainly has roots in the vernacular tradition:⁠ to overlook this premise is to misinterpret both Wood’s intentions and the cultural framework within which his work takes shape. To read the Dibble House—that is, the real counterpart of the house depicted in American Gothic—as a mere exercise in Gothic Revival would distort the semantic boundaries the artist himself delineated. In Carpenter Gothic: Nineteenth-Century Ornamented Houses of New England, Alma Dec and Deirdre Bartlett McArdle effectively summarize how the Gothic Revival—originating in England and later developing in America—unfolded along two complementary axes. On one side, there was the artisanal continuity transmitted by master builders, custodians of a medieval knowledge perpetuated in an almost liturgical fashion: this subterranean phenomenon has been evocatively termed Gothic Survival.⁠ On the other side, beginning in the late-eighteenth century, came the intervention of architects drawn to the Picturesque, whose theoretical contributions gradually overlaid its practical ones. In the American context, this dialectic reemerged, and Carpenter Gothic arose precisely at the intersection of constructive practice and design vision: the architectural principles that circulated in the texts of Andrew Jackson Downing, Ithiel Town, Alexander Jackson Davis, Gervase Wheeler, and Calvert Vaux engaged with the practical know-how of local carpenters, tasked with translating into built form the aspirations of clients seeking more accessible, customizable architectural solutions untethered from the strictures of academic tradition. For instance, Davis operated on both fronts: he designed for affluent clients but also democratized the language of architecture through the publication of pattern books—true typological manuals intended for both clients and artisans.⁠ Widely disseminated, these compendia contributed to the transformation of the wooden house into a vehicle of national identity. The ideals of John Claudius Loudon, Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, and John Ruskin were thus domesticated by the hands of American carpenters: high theory entered the workshop, and popular culture defined an autonomous building language in which the creativity of the carpenter-artist produced not only successfully resolved works but also those ornamental exuberances that Downing himself did not hesitate to denounce.⁠ According to the typological classification he proposed, dwellings could be mainly divided into Rural Gothic—identifiable through features such as steep gables and pointed-arch windows—and the Italianate style, characterized by overhanging roofs, balconies, and terraces. Within this taxonomy, Grant Wood consistently favored the Gothic lineage in its wooden variant, recognizing in it a formal language more aligned with his expressive sensibility and more representative of an authentically Midwestern identity. “I know now that our cardboardy frame houses on Iowa farms have distinct American quality and are very paintable. To me their hard edges are especially suggestive of the Middle West civilization.”⁠ Lumber, being economical and abundant, was more accessible than stone, and the introduction of steam-powered tools and balloon framing techniques had further encouraged its adoption; a skilled carpenter could thus replicate the elaborate Gothic motifs that, in masonry, remained the privilege of the wealthy.⁠ It is within this context that the choice to identify in the house of American Gothic—a simple one-and-a-half-story wooden structure with a gabled roof, a wooden porch, and a prefabricated Gothic window—the ‘archetypal’ American farmhouse must be understood.⁠ The correspondence between this building—including the post-1900 addition that gives it its characteristic L-shaped plan [Atlas 1, Fig.5]—and the model of “country house” proposed by Davis is striking, both graphically and in the textual descriptions with usage instructions.⁠ Davis intended the project to come across as simple, economical, and suitable for the American climate: a two-story house with an inhabitable attic, surrounded by a loggia that could either wrap around the entire building or terminate along a predetermined line. The ground floor spaces were designed to expand when needed by enclosing the loggia; as Davis noted, for instance, the area marked with the letter A could be easily absorbed into the kitchen, [Atlas 1, Fig.10] just as in the case of the Dibble House.⁠

In the transition from the on-site sketch to its later graphic reworking, culminating in the iconic final version [Atlas 1, Fig. 6] in American Gothic, Wood carried out a formal synthesis between two poles: the painterly and the linear.⁠ The choice of tools is far from incidental: the brush suggests and narrates; the pencil delimits, structures, and establishes a physical and semantic enclosure. The final painting emerges from the interweaving of four layers: the oil-and-watercolor sketch executed on location; the photographic documentation gathered in parallel; the theoretical model derived from Davis’s teachings; and, finally, the graphic elaboration, which abstracts from the contingent to present the house as a type.⁠ Likewise, the figures, liberated from the biographical data of their horizontal plot —understood as a descriptive function within the syntagmatic plane of the image—are elevated to emblems of belonging within a shared mental landscape, according to a paradigmatic logic that symbolically restructures the sign system.⁠ The same architectural type, now framed, now sectioned, reappears in two other works by Wood: Appraisal (1931) and Dinner for Threshers (1934). The former—originally titled Clothes—stages an encounter between two women.⁠ One, dressed in ostentatious elegance; the other, more humbly, firmly grips a chicken covered in majestic plumage. Here, clothing becomes a social index, and the scene operates as a visual synthesis of the tension between “working the land” and “owning the land” that runs through rural America. In the initial version—before Wood “reframed” the scene for compositional purposes, as reported by Wanda M. Corn—the two figures were separated from the viewer by a chicken wire fence [Atlas 1, Fig.20], an explicit denotation of social distance that also carries an ethical connotation.⁠ As in American Gothic, architecture here—the green-painted screen door, the clapboard siding, the wooden porch post [Atlas 1, Figs.12–14]—too acts as a type-character, bearer of a cultural and moral subtext, thus sympathizing with the characters it frames. These elements constitute an operative lexicon that the artist was gradually codifying. Through this approach, Wood transferred into pictorial language a function akin to the one Downing articulated in the introduction to his pattern books: to construct, through recognizable forms, a cultural repertoire.

VERNACULAR ASSEMBLAGE AND DECORATIVE ADVENTURES: GRANT WOOD ARCHITECT

Grant Wood carried forward his typological inquiry also through his work as a designer, which unfolded in parallel with his pictorial production, with intensity between 1925 and 1933.⁠ The desire to define a vernacular lexicon through the selective assemblage of elements drawn from the local context found full expression in the project for the Robert C. and Esther Armstrong House (1932–33), developed in collaboration with builder-architect Bruce McKay [Atlas 2, Fig. 2].

It is the last documented intervention among the fourteen architectural works completed by the artist during this period. The house is described by the United States Department of Historic Places as an example of “stylized vernacular”: foundations and walls in warm beige local limestone, and a shingle roof—a kind of philological reworking of Midwestern rural stone houses, hybridized with other regional idioms. The clients requested an “Iowa Architecture,” and Wood’s methodological response was one of assemblage, beginning with research into elements—sometimes conceptually referenced, sometimes physically reused—conducted through a careful survey of nineteenth-century vernacular buildings in the surroundings. The porch [Atlas 2, Fig. 2] is grafted onto the masonry shell like an alien presence; with its scalloped arches and octagonal columns, it faithfully replicates one observed during site visits with the clients in nearby towns. The stone comes from the quarries of Stone City—the ghost town where, at the same time, Wood founded his artist colony—and is carved by hand by two octogenarian stonemasons personally selected by him.⁠ The openings, marked by massive lintels, quote directly from the repertoire of Greek Revival.⁠ The fireplace closely reproduces the one from the Old Perkins Tavern (1855) [Atlas 2, Figs. 5-7], from which Wood also derived several elements for the interiors. A second architectural model was the Doe House [Atlas 2, Fig. 1] (1860), from which Wood borrowed key elements such as the recessed entrance [Atlas 2, fig.3], the proportions of the windowpanes, and the design of the original shutters. In the rear garden, enclosed by a dry-stone wall, he installed a semicircular stone bench, built from fragments salvaged from a disused mausoleum in Oak Hill Cemetery and precisely aligned with the dining room’s bow window [Atlas 2, Figs. 4,9]. In front of it, he placed a round table fashioned from the millstone that once belonged to the owner’s grandfather. Every wooden component—board-and-batten walls, staircase, doors, baseboards, and furnishings—was designed by Wood and crafted from locally sourced hardwoods such as pine, birch, and walnut. He also made use of his silversmith skills for the hardware with meticulous care: the wrought-iron fire screen incorporates custom-made hooks for hanging the children’s Christmas stockings. Lighting was treated with rhetorical intent: ceiling medallions are cast directly into the plaster as a nod to nineteenth-century fixtures designed for kerosene lamps, while outdoor bulbs are embedded in rough stone and deliberately left unfinished, evoking the natural irregularity of a grotto [Atlas 2, Figs. 8,10]. The Brussels carpet—woven in Philadelphia in green tones flecked with red—contributes to the staging of an alternate universe, its pattern conjuring the image of a blooming meadow.

Although many of the design experiments described may appear closer to spontaneous acts of “decorative adventure”—in the artist’s own words—than to fully structured typological investigations, even in cases of explicit stylistic exercise—such as the library doors (1929) made for the Italianate Van Vechten-Shaffer residence—Wood did not refrain from filtering citation through a local lens. The panels, decorated with grotesques in homage to Raphael, include the figure of Ceres, Roman goddess of agriculture—an explicit symbolic reference to Iowa’s rural identity [Atlas 2, Fig. 20]. In the same spirit, the pair of wrought-iron gates leading to the solarium porch incorporate an additional territorial marker: in the lower quadrant, isolated and stylized, appear several ears of wheat [Atlas 2, Fig. 19].⁠ A more active dialogue with Downing’s texts can be observed in the decorative project for the Iowa Corn Room (1925).⁠ It has already been noted that for formal and iconographic solutions, Wood drew inspiration from the nearby Peoples Savings Bank, designed by Louis Sullivan in 1911[Atlas 2, Fig. 18].⁠ In the Iowa Corn Room, every element—from the canvases to the curtains, down to the lighting fixtures—is treated according to a decorative system centered on the motif of maize. Exemplary is the Corn Cob Chandelier [Atlas 2, Fig.15], whose name seem to quite explicitly evoke Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s Corn Cob Capital (1808), already revived by A. J. Davis for the colonnade of the Smith-Playmakers Theater at the University of North Carolina (1849–1852) [Atlas 2, Figs. 16-17].⁠ Wood’s creation is a hand-painted copper-and-iron flourish, with arms that extend like stalks, culminating in fully ripened ears. Ornament here appears to give visual form to Sullivan’s famous principle that “it was there by the same right that a flower appears amid the leaves of its parent plant.”⁠ For his part, Downing had explicitly theorized that American architecture should emancipate itself from the ornamental inertia of European origin, instead deriving its decorative motifs from the elementary signs of the national landscape, to give built form an authentically local expression:

The capitals of the columns might be formed of the foliage and ear of Indian corn […] By the introduction, in an artistic manner, of the cotton, the tobacco, the magnolia, and other characteristic forms of foliage and flowers in the decorative parts of such a building, a novel and beautiful character would be given to the architecture, which every American would feel to have more meaning here than the zigzag or billet-molding of the Northern, or the more classical ornaments of the Southern Romanesque style, as it is seen in Europe.⁠

This passage is accompanied by an illustrative plate—Design for a New Capital [Atlas 2, Fig. 18]—in which the vocabulary of the classical order is reinterpreted according to an indigenous principle. In place of the usual Corinthian acanthus scrolls, Downing introduces a first register of corn leaves, surmounted by a second band of interwoven foliage wrapped around a kantharos—now far from the Greek archetype and closer to the basket weaving of rural American communities. Among these decorations appear the very ripened ears of corn that, seventy-five years later, will reemerge as the crowning element of Wood’s chandelier. In this object—archived among the minor arts and neglected by the same public that would one day elevate the artist to the status of national icon—lie, in apparent dormancy, the seeds of the regionalist poetics that he would later make flourish, with full ideological awareness, in his work of the nineteen-thirties, particularly in his mural cycles.

FROM SOIL TO WALL: WHEN TILLAGE BEGINS, OTHER ARTS FOLLOW

In December 1933, shortly after being appointed Iowa state director of the Public Works of Art Project, Grant Wood received a commission from Raymond M. Hughes, president of Iowa State College, to decorate several university spaces, including a frieze for the entrance hall of the Parks Library.⁠ This is one of the first mural interventions funded by the federal program in an academic context.⁠ The cycle is titled When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow, a quotation from Daniel Webster’s famous speech that elevates the labor of the land to the foundation of all civilization [Atlas 3, Fig. 7].⁠

Wood transformed the worksite into a collective workshop: he converted the former campus swimming pool into an atelier, recruited students and young artists from the Iowa State Fair, organizeed them into teams, and assigned tasks following a division of labor inspired by the agricultural world [Atlas 3, Fig.1].⁠ At the entrance to the library stands Breaking the Prairie, the introductory panel of the cycle [Atlas 3, Fig.2]. According to Lea DeLong Rosson, the title—assigned only later—refers to the scene in the background, where the plough cuts into the virgin prairie for the first time.⁠ In the foreground, however, a farmer tills an already cultivated field; to the sides, two men fell trees to prepare new land for planting. This is not merely a narrative choice: tillage is not an isolated founding act, but a moment within a cyclical process. The story begins in a “second phase,” and it is precisely in continuity—not in rupture—that the identity of Iowa’s agricultural civilization takes root.⁠ The first section to be completed was the triptych Other Arts Follow (1934) [Atlas 3, Figs. 3-5], placed along the stairwell. The iconography reflects the university’s fields of study: Agriculture, Home Economics, Engineering. The lateral panels, dedicated to disciplines then reserved for men, are marked by monumentality: on the left, a cart overflowing with harvest breaks through the frame; on the right [Atlas 3, Fig. 5], a stationary vertical radial engine spans the full double height of the industrial space, whose brick masonry and concrete slabs are rendered with precision. This configuration is commonly associated with early twentieth-century aviation technology—a reference underscored by the adjacent depiction of a propeller. Likely inspired by piston-driven air compressors, the engine is represented as a typological construct, combining technical realism with celebrative intent. It serves as a visual allegory for mechanical engineering, as indicated by the accompanying nameplate. At the center of the staircase [Atlas 3, Fig. 4], two panels address the theme of Home Economics, a field which, since the college’s founding, offered women access to higher education. Unlike Agriculture and Engineering—each labelled with corresponding plaques—the diptych does not explicitly name its internal subdivisions, though they are present: the scenes—Child Care, Fooding, Clothing, and House Cleaning—are treated more as practical activities than as specialized domains of knowledge, reflecting the widespread contemporary view of female expertise as rooted in caregiving rather than in the autonomous production of knowledge.⁠ The representational technique adopted by Wood in this cycle, for the first time, is that of the perspective section—a type of drawing which, at this scale, requires careful design planning and exposes technical aspects that allow for a didactic reading of the construction system. The side wings of the barn façade in Agriculture literally open to the viewer’s gaze, revealing in a cut-away the Gambrel roof framing. But it is in the panel dedicated to Home Economics that the interest in architectural detail emerges most clearly. Here, the section of the building displays, with textbook precision, the light-frame platform technique [Atlas 3, Fig. 11, 12], codified in federal manuals of the 1930s.⁠ Atop the concrete foundation sits a continuous sill plate, serving as a transitional element between the foundation and the wooden frame. Nailed to this are nominal joists, set at regular intervals, with rim or header joists closing the ends. To ensure structural stability —distributing the load and preventing racking —diagonal braces are nailed in to form an “X” pattern, a method known as cross-bridging.⁠

The division of the mural into panels that, while connected to form a polyptych, retain a certain autonomy, follows the rhythm imposed by the structure of the Parks Library vestibule, where the spacing between pilasters provides decorative surfaces to fill the wall infill. As a result, the work is structured into three triptychs, each developed to host a specific disciplinary theme. Wood had already tried his hand with the triptych format, with The First Three Degrees of Freemasonry [Atlas 3, Fig. 6].⁠ The three panels, dedicated to the degrees of Masonic initiation, construct a progressive narrative in which architecture takes on an allegorical function: the building of Solomon’s Temple, its completion, and its ruin. This symbolic sequence is enriched by classical quotations—from Albin Polasek’s The Builder to Rodin’s The Thinker [Atlas 3, Figs. 8–10]—which reinforce the iconographic dimension of the composition.⁠ This triadic structure seems to re-emerge, in secularized form, in the organization of the mural cycle When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow—including the detached section Breaking the Prairie—and extending ideally to Dinner for Threshers, a project for a mural developed in parallel, independently of any commission, yet with notable points of contact on both formal and narrative levels.⁠ The sowing of the prairie, understood as the dawn of agricultural civilization, corresponds to the degree of apprenticeship:⁠ it is the initial, foundational labor, the beginning of the process. The panels of Other Arts Follow, dedicated to applied arts, embody the journeyman’s degree: the full operativity of the “derivative” arts, grounded in technical competence and the transmission of knowledge. Dinner for Threshers ultimately represents the master’s degree. In this final panel, the cycle reaches its culmination through death and rebirth, embodied in the ritual of the shared meal on threshing day. Here, an offstage Wood reconstructed a cherished childhood memory, transfigured into a celebration of labor and collective remembrance.

DINNER FOR THRESHERS: INTERPRETING THE COMMONPLACE

While overseeing the work on the library, the pictorial construction of Dinner for Threshers began to take shape. Wood developed two series of preparatory drawings. Of the first—executed in graphite, opaque watercolor, and colored pencil in 1933 [Atlas 4, Figs. 1–2]—only the two lateral fields survive, now held by the Whitney Museum of American Art. As in Study for Breaking the Prairie, the composition is articulated in three sheets.⁠ A second version, executed on a single sheet in 1934 and titled Study for Dinner for Threshers [Atlas 4, Fig. 3], was purchased by Helen Lansdowne Resor—wife of broker Stanley Resor—and entered their private collection, while the third version (1934), in tempera on masonite [Atlas 4, Fig. 4], was acquired by Mr. and Mrs. Rockefeller 3rd and later donated to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. A fourth version, never realized, would have eventually seen the transposition of the drawing on wall.

Dinner for Threshers is not Wood’s most famous work, but it is certainly one of the most intricate in terms of compositional complexity and symbolic density. Interpretations range from biographical correspondences to commentary on the socioeconomic context, from psychologically or queer-inflected readings to iconological frameworks—each contributing to the layered meaning of the image. The scene, rendered in longitudinal section, depicts the interior of a farmhouse. At the center, the dining room hosts fourteen men seated around a long set table, awaiting their meal. Two female figures animate the scene: one pauses to converse with a guest, the other enters from the adjoining room carrying a bowl of mashed potatoes. The room, framed by two open doorways and opened to the outside through a window, features on the back wall a lithograph and the metal-jacketed box of a disused flue, recognizable by the toothed flange identical to the one still in use in the adjacent kitchen. The right-hand panel depicts the latter, with two women busy preparing food, a cat drawn by the aroma, and a rich array of details that document domestic material culture: dishes neatly arranged on a cupboard, a red water pump mounted on a long counter, and a Victorian cast iron stove with its accompanying utensils. On the opposite side, the scene opens outward to the farmyard. A red barn, topped with a gambrel roof—a type common in the Midwest from the late nineteenth century onward to maximize storage space for hay or grain—is crowned with a square cupola equipped with louvres.⁠ In front of it, in the yard, two horses drink, preceded by a small group of chickens; three male figures in overalls, dressed like the diners inside, stand on the porch: two are grooming themselves, while the third, visibly younger, carries a bucket of water. The precision with which objects, architectural details, and figures are rendered offers a meticulous portrayal of Midwestern farm life in the early decades of the twentieth century. The caption clarifies that the scene depicts threshing day—the culminating phase of the agricultural season, when grain is separated from straw and chaff. In rural communities, this was a collective event involving families, neighbors, and seasonal workers, often ending with a shared meal in a spirit of gratitude. Speaking about the work, Wood states: “Dinner for Threshers is taken from my life. There are my family and our neighbors, our tablecloths, our chairs, and our chickens.”⁠

The house depicted is the one in Anamosa, where Wood was born in 1891. Among the neighbors—though completely transfigured as types—are the Weavers, his maternal relatives. It is precisely on their plot, at a respectful distance from the imposing lion-shaped funerary monument erected by the Wood family, that the artist will request to be buried beside his mother—for whose burial he fought with equal determination—in Riverside Cemetery in Anamosa.⁠ These biographical details are far from incidental: not only do they help counter certain contradictory interpretations that have alternately cast Wood as a reactionary or a socialist, but they also illuminate the social reality the work represents.⁠ Political or religious differences—such as those between the Woods, Republican Quakers from Virginia, and the Weavers, Democratic Presbyterians from New York—are dissolved in the face of collective life: from sharing agricultural labor to building family networks.⁠ Of the childhood home, destroyed by fire in 1974, a few photographs survive [Atlas 1, Figs.16–17], showing white clapboard siding and a porch with the now-canonical column.⁠ In the pictorial transposition, however, the form is simplified and reinterpreted. As Wood repeatedly stated, “If you want to duplicate a thing, you take a photograph.”⁠ His method was never purely mimetic: the selection of details and the critical assemblage of elements drawn from real sources—whether deeply personal craft objects or mass-produced items—combine to construct an image which is, first and foremost, a mental construct. The twelve chairs around the dining table are the same ones his mother bought with her savings from teaching: “Hattie bought twelve dining chairs, and they weren’t always enough when the Wood and Weaver families got together. It was the time of velvet albums, kerosene lamps, abundant food, and great hospitality.”⁠ And indeed, at the head of the table we find a Windsor chair with the typical carved volutes on the crest rail [Atlas 5, Fig. 1], and along the side, a stool borrowed from the parlor organ.⁠ According to Garwood, on the occasion depicted, the family uses their Haviland moss-rose porcelain set [Atlas 5, Fig. 3], while the ironstone dishes remains on the shelf. On the floor, one of the rag rugs Mrs. Wood wove and gave as gifts to her son’s friends: Dave Turner kept several in his funeral home, and the painter had one underfoot in his studio while working on the painting [Atlas 5, Fig. 5].⁠ The cupboard does not come from the Anamosa house—it is the piece Grant built for his mother in the basement kitchen of the Kenwood Heights house, where he moved with his friend Paul Hanson after abandoning the shack-studio, and with whom he shared a photography-illustrator atelier (1911). The piece is reproduced faithfully: same design, same handle, the same slightly faded slate blue.⁠ For everything not drawn from a specific autobiographical source, Wood—by his own account—used Sears, Roebuck catalogues as a reference for objects. In one of his most significant declarations he stated:

I began to realize that there was real decoration in the rickrack braid on the aprons of the farmers’ wives, in calico patterns and in the lace curtains. At present, my most useful reference book, and one that is authentic, is a Sears, Roebuck catalogue. And so, to my great joy, I discover that in the very commonplace, in my native surroundings, were decorative adventures and that my only difficulty had been taking them too much for granted.⁠

Consulting various editions of the catalogues from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of the objects in the scene are clearly identifiable.⁠ In the kitchen, one finds the Pitcher Spout Pump—the same object the artist will later depict in a portrait in 1937 [Atlas 5, Fig. 20–21]—the Peerless Enamelled Steel Coffee Boiler, tin-lidded saucepans, and lightweight fabric curtains made of scrim or marquisette [Atlas 5, Figs. 6-8,17,18]. The exterior space, too, is constructed through the layering of visual sources drawn from Sears catalogues: cedar buckets with galvanized iron bands, modular wagon wheels, and finally the Kenwood Windmill, which recurs across the artist’s work as an identity emblem—almost a visual signature [Atlas 5, Figs.,14-16].⁠ ⁠ The inclusion of highly specific objects—such as the decorated cap placed over the flue opening, the Wild Horses Currier and Ives lithograph (or Black and White Beauties, as Wood recalled it) [Atlas 5, Fig.12], or the wooden match holder hanging on the kitchen wall—combined with other standardized, catalogue-sourced elements, serves to immerse the viewer in the depicted environment.⁠ It invites not only the evocation of personal memory, but also the establishment of a direct dialogue with the painting—and, by extension, with one’s own lived experience, in its specific architectural and typological configuration. Among all the objects in the scene, the dining table remains the most enigmatic: in every version of the work, the legs are absent, and the entire area beneath it is immersed in shadow. During threshing time, it was customary to push together several tables to form a long communal one, but testimonies diverge. Garwood himself alternately describes an oval table or “a very long table on which two or three red-checked tablecloths sewn together by his mother were laid.” What is certain, however, is that when Wood will furnish his Victorian residence in Iowa City, he chooses a twenty-foot-long table, built with three layers of masonite and iron legs salvaged from an old pharmacy counter: a table “big enough to feed threshers; fifteen or twenty dinner guests didn’t crowd it.”⁠ Whatever the material reference, it is the meaning that endures: the gigantic table as a mental and symbolic space, held in childhood memory and destined to resurface in adult life as a foundational sign of sociality and sharing. And it is precisely this meaning that the painting gives form to, making it, above all else, his own manifesto.

WEAVE OF SIGNS: A SONG OF WILD PRAIRIE LILY AND FLEUR-DE-LIS

Between the two works on paper and the final tempera-on-masonite version, few differences emerge—the most evident of which concerns the decorative motif of the wallpaper [Atlas 6, Figs. 7,8]. The pattern adopted in the 1934 tempera version, while maintaining a grid-like structure similar to that of the 1933 drawings, aligns with a different symbolic register, one rooted in a bourgeois and Victorian domestic lexicon.

Beyond the plausible historical accuracy—after all, their parlor was known to be “the most elegant for miles around”—it is well known that, as early as the late nineteen-twenties, Wood had turned his attention to the furnishings and decorations of Victorian homes in the Midwest, drawing inspiration from them for various decorative projects, including the design of a Lounge Chair and Ottoman in 1938 for his own living room [Atlas 6, Fig.3].⁠ ⁠ In 1933, he redecorated the room above the Smitty Café on Dubuque Street, intended to host the meetings of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Speakers, a goliardic club he co-founded in the context of the University of Iowa lectures series, where he served as a Professor of Fine Art. He did so, by his own admission, in the “worst of the Victorian style”, dominated by floral wallpapers and a deliberately eccentric, even caricatural décor, as documented by numerous photographs depicting the artist and his guests in period costume [Atlas 6, Figs. 1,2].⁠ The decorative motif that appears on the wall in the final version of the painting fits fully within this ornamental genealogy, drawing from nineteenth-century pattern books in which lozenge grids and floral interlacing merge into seamlessly continuous, meticulously rhythmic surfaces [Atlas 6, Fig. 5].⁠ In the tempera version, at the center of the front-facing plate displayed on the cupboard, a small stylized red flower appears. The extremely reduced scale of the mark—approximately 2 × 2 mm—makes it difficult to read with the naked eye, but comparison with the preparatory drawings reveals a clear resemblance to the motif decorating the wallpaper. It is most likely a fleur-de-lis, which appeared on the flag of New France until 1715—and whose jurisdiction once extended to the territories of present-day Iowa [Atlas 6, Fig. 9]. It cannot be ruled out, however, that the wallpaper motif was originally conceived as a stylization of the Wild Prairie Lily (Lilium Philadelphicum) [Atlas 6, Fig. 12], a native Midwestern species belonging to the same botanical genus of the one traditionally associated with the heraldic flower—and already evoked in Breaking the Prairie [Atlas 6, Fig. 13]. The process of graphic simplification—a formal exercise to which Wood devoted significant attention in his ornamental experiments—may have rendered its contours ambiguously similar to the blazoned flower, inadvertently imbuing it with meanings foreign to the original intent. Given the symbolic charge of that motif—an emblem of the French colonial legacy from which Wood was increasingly seeking to distance himself—it seems plausible that the artist deliberately altered its appearance to avoid any counterproductive associations. Wood’s deep botanical knowledge had its roots in childhood. In Return from Bohemia, the artist recalled how, returning from a walk, he once brought home a bouquet of flowers which his mother, seated on the porch, could identify one by one with precision: buttercups, marsh marigolds, cowslips, lavender wild geraniums, prairie pointers, wild strawberries, blue flags, the great plume of Solomon’s Seal, and finally the red-orange meadow lilies. For her, each flower was a “personality”—fragile, exquisite, almost human.⁠ From this perspective, the stylized flower takes on a mnemonic and emotional value, part of an identity repertoire in which Midwestern flora becomes a sign of what is most intimate and familiar: the bond with the mother and with an internalized landscape is transfigured into the decoration of the domestic interior itself, turning the architecture into a protective envelope—like Piero della Francesca’s Madonna revived in the Memorial Window—capable of sheltering and preserving the community within.

The dialogue with the femininity of the domestic space—evoked through decorative motifs and maternal memory—ultimately intersects with a more complex discourse on masculine figures. A queer reading—first proposed by Tripp Evans and later extended to Wood’s entire oeuvre by Sue Taylor—identifies in this painting a coexistence, and a tension, between the celebration of feminine domestic care and the admiration of the male threshers’ corporeality.⁠ Emblematic in this sense is Evans’s emphasis on the sequence of the diners’ backsides, whose visual rhythm echoes—almost obsessively—that of the folds in the tablecloth. Despite the now fairly shared recognition of Wood’s homosexuality, certain comparisons would do little more than seek additional confirmation of an already evident interest in the representation of the male body.⁠ A reading from a semiotic perspective, by contrast, offers greater clarity with regard to the communicative intentions that underlie the work’s complex network of signs, contributing to the decoding of its overarching message. This interpretive operation is supported by Wood’s own words. During the brief yet pivotal period in which he taught at the art school he founded in Stone City, he articulated his view of artmaking as an act shaped by the purpose of communication: “Our theory being that when a painter has a definite message, he will by experiment, find the most adequate means of expressing it, let the result be as conservative, as eclectic or as radical as it may.”⁠

The muscular backs depicted function as indices of the physical strength required to carry out the full agricultural cycle—from ploughing to threshing; the flush of the cheeks, in contrast to the forehead left pale, signals work performed under a scorching sun; the uniformity of the overalls suggests a functional practicality that leaves little room for individual stylistic expression; finally, the lowered sleeves of the diners—in contrast to the rolled-up ones of the laborers outside—indicate a search for decorum upon crossing the domestic threshold, as well as a gesture of respect toward those who have prepared the meal. These clues gain additional weight when placed in dialogue with iconographic readings, among which Evans’s remain among the keenest.

FLIGHT FROM THE HOME: THE LAST SUPPER OF THE MIDWEST

Evans recalls how contemporary critics already noted the Italian lineage of the work: the American Magazine of Art spoke of a “purity” worthy of Fra Angelico, while the New York Times evoked the “monumental simplicity” of Giotto. The reference to the Last Supper [Atlas 7, Fig. 3] is evident, widely agreed upon, and confirmed by the artist’s travels in Italy and his direct engagement with Renaissance visual sources.⁠ ⁠ It is Evans himself who offers a compelling iconological reinterpretation of the painting, overlaying the Christian model with an autobiographical version: Maryville Wood, the artist’s father, died in 1901. “The coffin was in the parlor of our home—the room with the gold wallpaper and the roses.”⁠ The omission of the table legs in such a meticulously rendered work, and the darkness enveloping that area, might tempt one to go further, connecting this macabre biographical detail to the visual narrative. Yet it is again Evans who confirms the already recognized figure of Maryville in the thresher seated on the stool with his back to us, justifying the choice through the strict logic of hospitality: the head of the household takes “the least comfortable seat.”⁠ However, the vanishing point of the entire composition does not converge on him, as his analysis would suggest, but rather on the arm of another diner. This is a significant deviation, one that distances the scene from a canonical Christomimetic reading and instead redirects it, at once, into a broader code—that of genre painting—with which Wood simultaneously engaged.⁠ The allegory constructed through the ordinariness of the domestic interior and its inhabitants is by no means new to art history, and its strength lies precisely in the ability to transfigure the everyday into symbolic form, without abandoning its grounding in the real, lapsing into sentimental dramatization, or renouncing mythic evocation by means of learned citation.⁠ One of the most compelling interpretations concerns the association between the patches of white skin left by the men’s hats and the haloes of the apostles. The mark of labor in the fields is transformed, at the moment of the meal, into a trace of secular sanctification. The division by gender and function also recalls that of medieval triptychs, and one can easily agree with the author in identifying, in the young boy carrying water on the left-hand panel, the figure of Grant himself—who, at the time depicted in the painting, was ten years old and who, “at threshing time, he was the water boy.”⁠ On the right-hand panel we find his female counterpart: his mother, Hattie, portrayed in a monumental position behind the cookstove, serving food from a steaming pot. It is the visual translation of a passage from Return from Bohemia: “Mother was standing before the big wood-range, dishing food out of the steaming kettle.”⁠ She is, in fact, the true allegory of the Savior, as suggested by the resemblance of her face to that of Christ in Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel [Atlas 7, Fig. 4], a rhetorical operation which finds full justification in light of the central role she played in the artist’s life: guardian of the domestic temple, a vestal charged with ensuring its survival after the father’s death, and also a key figure—apron in place of the Virgin’s mantle—in the stylistic revolution undertaken by Wood. A first ‘transgender’ transfiguration of Hattie occurred in Woman with Plants, modelled on Hans Memling’s Portrait of a Man and Leonardo’s Mona Lisa [Atlas 7, Figs. 6–8], right after his artistic conversion.⁠

The iconography of fourteenth-century Italian painting, and particularly that of Giotto, also reappears in the compositional structure: Dinner for Threshers inherits from the Last Supper the arrangement of the diners on all sides of the table, a convention that gradually disappeared in the Renaissance, where figures shown from behind were often moved to the far side of the table.⁠ An even closer similarity emerges from a previously unnoticed comparison with The Feast of Herod [Atlas 7, Fig. 10], where the architectural setting divides the scene into three parts: at the center, the men seated at the table partake in the enactment of the rite; on the right, its preparation is entrusted to women; on the left, at the threshold of the scene, a mediator—through the act of music-making—confers an official character upon the banquet, sacralizing its profane form. The female figure who crosses the threshold between the two spaces—in Giotto after delivering the Baptist’s head, in Wood carrying a bowl of abundance crowned by a pat of butter—is, in every respect, the officiant of the ceremony.⁠ Not only the figures, but the architecture itself participates in this dialogue. In addition to the wallpaper resembling the painted wall and the reproduction of a sectional interior, the red barn on the left—with its white frame around a blind opening and its cupola with arched vents—echoes the vocabulary of pilasters and blind arcading found in Giotto’s towers. A second red building, barely visible on the right, formally balances the two architectural segments. Wood’s intention is clear: not only to consecrate the ceremonial of the meal and its participants, but to transform the childhood home into a temple, further sublimating a legacy of Quaker thought according to which the sacred and the profane are not separate domains, but coexisting aspects of everyday life. Every gesture may become sacrament, every place—from the barn to the threshold—can become a space of revelation.⁠ The threshers advance in procession from the farmyard—now transfigured into a parvis—toward the porch, transformed into a narthex. The washtub placed at the threshold is a decisive detail, almost a direct quotation of the font of holy water: during threshing days, just a few splashes of water were enough to rid the skin of the dust that caused irritation and to restore order to the body. The transition from field labor to the communion of the meal thus takes place through the ritual gesture of purification—an act Wood would evoke more explicitly in Saturday Night Bath (1937), where the iconography of Piero della Francesca’s neophyte is transferred to the body of the farm worker [Atlas 7, Figs. 1, 2].⁠ Dinner for Threshers stages the agrarian rite of the communal meal, the culminating moment of the harvest season and a fundamental node in the social life of rural communities.⁠ Cooperation among farms not only optimized labor but fostered relationships between families and offered unmarried youths the opportunity to integrate into community life; Wood wrote:

The most exciting event of each childhood year was threshing day, when the big machines and neighboring farmers arrived to help thresh the grain. The threshers’ noontime meal was a feast, brimming the little farmhouse over with people, smells, and activities.⁠

Every element of the composition—from utensils to decorations—contributes to organizing the space and time of the ceremony, evoking a collective memory and setting in motion a mechanism of cohesion. It is in the repetition of the ritual that the sense of belonging to a group is preserved and renewed.⁠ Rather than nostalgic—now widely refuted by the scholarship—Wood’s formal register appears ordered and deliberate: Dinner for Threshers records the fragmentation and the loss of meaning of rituals in modern urban life, and proposes, in visual form, a return to the diffuse and participatory sacredness of collective existence.⁠ In the present of the adult Wood, many of the practices that had organically accompanied the life cycles of his childhood came to appear as separate activities, stripped of their symbolic and relational dimensions. The most significant sociological feature of the farmhouse lied precisely in its role as the gravitational center of everyday family life. Unlike the emerging model of the 1930s, marked by spatial disaggregation and temporal fragmentation—with individuals oriented toward autonomous trajectories, transiting from the self-sustaining, productive family unit to living alone and acquiring wages—the rural family shared the hours of the day within a common perimeter, articulated between home, school, fields, and barn. And in the evening, the hearth reasserted itself as the symbolic and emotional core around which the domestic community gathered.⁠

The family’s move, that same year, from the farm to the city of Cedar Rapids marked a pivotal moment in his biography—one that became the cipher of an experience shared by many Americans. It was not merely a change of setting, but the crossing of a historical threshold: the passage from nineteenth-century agrarian America to the modern urbanism of the twentieth century. Millions of individuals, during those same years, traversed that same fracture, redefining space, relationships, and identity. Designated by economists as the “golden age of American agriculture,” the period straddling the turn of the century coincided in Iowa with the apex of mechanization and a rapid increase in land value.⁠ Innovations such as Froelich’s gasoline-powered thresher (1892) and Hart-Parr’s tractor (1907) radically transformed farm life, culminating in the dominance of a few large enterprises.⁠ ⁠ But the machine that increased productivity also reduced the need for manual labor: as early as 1910, Iowa recorded population decline in seventy-one rural counties, while the twenty-eight with urban majorities were on the rise.⁠ This dynamic was compounded by the development of an early industrial fabric, the rise of the automobile, and the delayed electrification of rural areas—all factors that deepened the divide between city and countryside and fuelled the phenomenon known as the flight from the farm.⁠ ⁠ Deruralization entailed not only the physical dispersion of agricultural communities but also a profound symbolic desacralization: the identity of the group disintegrates in favor of the individual, and that of the individual in favor of the group, and architecture—both rural and metropolitan—came to play a central role in representing this transformation. Already in the mural Adoration of the Home [Atlas 7, Fig. 11], Wood staged the tension between the individual dwelling of small rural communities and urban expansion: a female figure holds a model of a single-family house—clearly legible in its architectural features—while an indistinct urban skyline looms in the background. Commissioned by the broker Henry Ely as a promotional tool, the painting transcends its advertising function to aspire to a civic meaning: Cedar Rapids is presented as a “city of homes,” where the house becomes an interface between private life and public space, a symbol of a community resisting the homogenization of the metropolis.

Though not funded by federal agencies and rooted in personal memory, the mural project Dinner for Threshers continues the same civil and symbolic reflection already initiated in Adoration of the Home and made explicit in Wood’s public commissions. The model of rural cooperation it celebrates is the very one Roosevelt adopted as a paradigm for national recovery. The first pencil sketch dates to 1933, the same year the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) was established—one of the key instruments of the New Deal’s agricultural program.⁠ Over the span of two decades, Iowa underwent the paradox typical of every productive revolution: economic growth was accompanied by the dissolution of the social fabric, and agricultural abundance itself became the very seed of exodus. The countryside—once the epicenter of community life—gradually lost its centrality in the national imagination, relegated to the margins in the form of quaint nostalgia, if not outright caricature. Hence the ambivalence with which American Gothic was received in 1930: to some, a satirical parody of an archaic world; to others, the solemn effigy of a resilient American spirit. As Barbara Haskell observes, it was the trauma of the Great Depression that reversed the trend: in the symbolic economy of the nineteen-thirties, the rural Midwest was no longer a relic to be forgotten, but a redemptive reservoir of values—authentic, ancestral, enduring.⁠ It is precisely within this symbolic inversion that a curious parallel emerges with The Wizard of Oz (1939): not as escapism, but as a parable of return. Dorothy’s revelation “This is the place I’ve been looking for all my life”is not merely an assertion of domestic belonging: it is the mythopoetic reinvestment of the Midwest—as much for Dorothy as for Grant synonymous with “home”—as the locus of truth. And what is most striking is the uncanny resonance of this phrase with the confession Grant Wood had formulated nearly a decade earlier: “I had to go to France to appreciate Iowa.” At the heart of both declarations lies the same structure of recognition: the journey as a necessary experience of estrangement, the return as an epiphanic moment of synthesis.

REVOLT AGAINST THE CITY:

THE FARMHOUSE-AS-MANSIO, A MANIFESTO

In 1934, Wood submitted the second drawing to the Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh and, although it did not win a prize, was voted the third most popular by the public. Time magazine described it as “simple and direct,” and the work was said to bear “as genuine a U.S. stamp as a hot dog stand or a baseball park.⁠ The magazine published the image along with a series of critical letters from readers. In August 1935, the artist responded firmly: “It was painted with my paint and my brushes on my own time. It is of and by me, and readers have no right to try to force upon me their families and their farms.”⁠

Free from the pressures of managing public resources and the spatial constraints imposed by mural commissions, and while his ideas were converging in the manifesto Revolt Against the City, Wood worked on what could eventually be considered the fullest expression of his vision of regionalism.⁠ Dinner for Threshers became, in every respect, his political declaration in pictorial form. For Wood, regionalism—a term that already felt too narrow by the time he adopted it—was above all an act of revolt: against homogenization and against intellectual dependence on colonial Europe.⁠ It is not, then, a sentimental return to the countryside against industrialization, but a return to one’s origins, as declared by the author himself and confirmed by scholars.⁠ Revolt Against the City positions itself as a counter-discourse to the “revolt against the village”:⁠ it is not the city itself that is under attack, but a form of living that has severed its connection to place and robbed people of the ability to clearly perceive the richness in the ordinary, small things they have left behind.⁠ To paint local subjects, for Wood, meant returning to Anamosa—to the places and faces he knew best. The artist must depict what is most familiar to them, because it is the reality about which they have something truthful to say. In this sense, his exhortation is unequivocal: no one should address rural themes unless they have a rural past—this applies to painting just as much as to literature or music.⁠ The style he adopted to convey this message is that of a mature artist, capable of integrating Late Gothic composition with Renaissance studies of light and perspective, the lessons of Neue Sachlichkeit into a personal synthesis coherent with his own experience. Wood treated pictorial and architectural styles as tools to define types: he filtered them through his own sensibility and employed them as an operative vocabulary. When one viewer criticized a technical error in the overly round shadow cast by the chickens, Wood pulled out a micrometer and cited astronomical data to demonstrate that, at Iowa’s latitude, at that hour and during threshing season, shadows would indeed fall precisely to the northeast, just as in the painting.⁠ When a reader remarked that the back door lacks a screen and that the kitchen would therefore be full of flies, Wood responded categorically:

Why allow me, without comment, to bisect an entire house and then quibble about a screen door? Especially when the presence of the screen door would ruin my composition. If the lady from North Dakota is so mentally hide-bound that she cannot make allowance for this, let her imagine the screen door open at a 45-degree angle-for a momentary and flyless space of time.⁠

In this way, he transformed the accusation of documentary inaccuracy into a reflection on the nature of representational convention: what is perceived as realistic is, in fact, the calibrated effect of a code—a delicate equilibrium between subjective memory, collective projection, and compositional necessity—in which the precision of detail serves both to conceal and to disclose the image’s mental construction. The model house in Dinner for Threshers is structured as an orderly sequence of enfilade rooms, beginning with a front porch and ending with a back door. The structure resembles that of a theater set—an object with which Wood had recently re-engaged during his time with the Stone City art colony [Atlas 8, Fig. 4].

It is no coincidence that, in layout and design, the painting closely resembles the scenographic panel of the Ideal City in Berlin. Specifically, Wood’s painting mirrors the spatial tripartition achieved through the lateral arched wings. A digital overlay of the two works, calibrated through their vanishing points, reveals a precise perspectival correspondence [Atlas 8, Fig. 1]. The depth of the stage-like space is even identical: in the Renaissance case, it is generated by the loggia with its diamond-patterned intrados; in Wood’s, by the plastered ceiling of the dining room. The entrance threshold, lacking the hinged door that so irked the lady from North Dakota, functions as a scenic passage for the characters’ entry; symmetrically, the sectioned opening between the kitchen and the dining room segments the internal narrative. The formal coincidence and the constructive precision of the analogy betray a deliberate reference. After all, if Dinner for Threshers presents an idealized image of a provincial model home, it is hardly surprising that Wood would engage with one of the most paradigmatic representations of the ideal city—incidentally, the only work he ever executed using the same technique of tempera-on-Masonite.⁠ The Ideal City panel in Berlin, too—however well disguised—presents itself to the viewer as a perspectival section; while the ideal loggia ends in itself, Wood’s cut deliberately excludes the upper floor and any vertical extension: no staircase is visible; a slight allusion to upward development survives only in the preparatory drawing, largely lost in the transition to Masonite. The porticoed house is shown entirely in the thickness of the ground floor, as if all its reality—and thus all its truth—were contained in that sequence of enfilade rooms, echoing the archetypal cailles longues.⁠ This horizontal arrangement is not just a continuation of Wood’s typological inquiry, but the adoption of a visual code. Dinner for Threshers adopts—both in its structure and its narrative syntax—an iconographic grammar traditionally reserved, in Late Gothic painting, for depictions of the life of Christ. The ground floor of the house unfolds like a sacred predella, organizing the rooms into a sequence that the public can read as a sacred space. The effect is that of a sacred representation of ‘everyday’ life, in which visual staging constructs a scene intended not only for the aesthetic experience of a performance, but for the reception and interiorization of a political message. As in medieval sacred cycles, the narrative relies on a relational code that the viewer can recognize and interpret: the lost domesticity is offered as a mythical horizon through which to move forward. The perspectival section imposes a pedagogical relationship on the viewer, codifying a system of signs in which the signifier—the communal meal—points to a deeper signified: communion, no longer Eucharistic but agricultural, based on the proximity of individuals gathered to share the fruits of collective labor.

The compositional layout directly recalls the form of the mansio, a scenographic structure typical of medieval itinerant sacred plays and commonly adopted by Giotto [Atlas 8, Figs. 6, 8].⁠ A well-documented iconographic reference is Advent and Triumph of Christ by Hans Memling (1480) [Atlas 8, Fig. 7], a work Wood admired in 1928 in Munich, in which the episodes of Christ’s life unfold within an idealized Jerusalem, studded with open, ruined, or truncated architectures that sacrifice themselves as stages for the sacred narrative. And while Wood explicitly declared his admiration for the masters of Northern Europe, the spatial construction of Dinner for Threshers reveals an equally deep affinity with the language of Italian painting: “an interior seen from the exterior,” a space that privileges symbolic objectivity over perspectival subjectivity.⁠ Here too, as revealed by the reverse perspective [Atlas 8, Fig.5], the focal distance between observer and scene does not invite entry into the space but rather demands that it be deciphered. The floor, abruptly interrupted at the point of section, marks the threshold between the space of representation and the time of interpretation. Compared to contemporary works such as Thanksgiving by Doris Lee [Atlas 8, Fig. 2]—often associated with Dinner for Threshers—Wood’s solution is radically different. While Lee adopted a high vanishing point and an immersive viewpoint that draws the spectator into the bustling kitchen, Wood constructed a frontal and detached vision, in which the domestic is observed from the audience. One aligns with the women’s everyday toil, the other establishes a moral paradigm grounded in distance and form. Euripidean theater on one side, Sophoclean on the other. In the end, anti-classical and classical. The adherence to or abstraction from the real—exercised freely—acquires meaning only insofar as the image of the house is not merely the representation of a lived space, nor simply the narration of a biographical experience, but rises to the level of a type, which is above all an exemplary and paradigmatic form. This is achieved by means of a conscious operative lexicon, which is not accessory but essential to the transmission of meaning and through the recourse to a recognizable and sedimented visual and cultural code. In this transition, the house becomes a device: a place that does not merely host the scene but institutes it; a scene that does not merely represent but transmits a mythical repertoire of shared values. Dinner for Threshers thus enacts a transfiguration of the Carpenter Gothic farmhouse into a prophane temple, bringing mural painting back to its archetypal function as sacra rappresentazione. Yet it is a secular sacrality: a civic liturgy that celebrates—through form, signs, and references—the founding principles of democracy.

The images of The Last Supper of the Midwest are preserved in the eponymous collection, as part of the Archives de l’imaginaire project.

AUTHOR

Filippo Fanciotti is an architect, artist, and PhD candidate at LAPIS (EPFL), where he explores digital architectural representation as a methodological tool for engaging with pictorial art history.