Grant Wood is an American painter. He is best known for his paintings of the rural American Midwest. He attended the Minneapolis School of Design and Handicraft in 1910, then worked as a designer and ran a silversmith workshop with Christopher Hega in Chicago. He went to Paris in 1920 and attended the Académie Julian in 1923. He discovered German Renaissance art and New Objectivity during a trip to Germany in 1928, where he studied in Munich. Influenced for a time by the art of Rousseau, he painted canvases imbued with naivety such as The Arrival of Spring (Spring Turning) in 1936. This painting, which represents an Iowa landscape, is of great simplicity with its toy-like elements. Conversely, in 1930, his painting American Gothic, undoubtedly one of the most famous, aimed for pure and hard realism by showing the reality of the Midwest. Two characters pose in front of their farm, a girl (his sister Nan) and his dentist (Dr. McKeeby), the latter holding a pitchfork, a symbol of deep America. The serious and severe gaze, the two characters and the setting show the American rural reality. When Wood exhibited this painting in 1930 at the Art Institute of Chicago, he was accused of having given too caricatural a vision of American peasants and of having wanted to stigmatize their mentality hostile to civilization, in opposition to the progressive thought that was emerging at that time in large cities like Chicago.