The most famous farming couple in American history may not be a couple at all. The man with the pitchfork was Grant Wood’s family dentist, Dr. Byron McKeeby, the woman was Wood’s sister Nan, and her apron was trimmed with rickrack torn from their mother’s discarded dresses. This episode reveals how a hurried sketch of a flimsy Carpenter Gothic house in Eldon, Iowa, in August 1930 became one of the most parodied and misunderstood images of the 20th century.

We examine how Wood, trained in the avant-garde scenes of Paris and Munich, treated the painting like a film production, posing his models separately in a Cedar Rapids studio and echoing the Gothic window in the pitchfork tines and overall stitching. East Coast critics read it as satire, Iowans sent hate mail, and then the deepening Great Depression flipped its meaning into a symbol of pioneer resilience. We also explore the mourning portrait theory, the rigid pre-World War I photographic poses, and the Pluto and Proserpina reading.

• Why Wood called the Dibble House a structural absurdity and exaggerated its proportions
• The husband-and-wife versus father-and-daughter debate that Wood refused to settle publicly for years
• How the Art Institute of Chicago’s bronze medal and $300 prize launched the painting’s fame
• Wood’s reinvention as a folksy regionalist who claimed his best ideas came while milking a cow
• How entering the public domain in 1958 opened the door to Gordon Parks, Green Acres, The Simpsons, and endless parodies