The Pump

Grant WoodWW-1937-029490

1937·Black crayon, with touches of graphite, on cream wove card·13.7 × 10.6 cm (5 7/16 × 4 3/16 in.)

Grant Wood, famous for his representations of the Midwest—of which the Art Institute’s American Gothic (1930.934) is his most recognizable example—intended The Pump to be an illustration for Sinclair Lewis’s novel Main Street (1920). This image of a contemporary water pump would have been a perfect fit for Lewis’s novel about life in a midwestern town. The drawing was given to the Art Institute by Carter Manny, Jr., who received it as a high school graduation gift from the artist in 1937.

Catalogue

Year: 1937
Medium: Black crayon, with touches of graphite, on cream wove card
Dimensions: 13.7 × 10.6 cm (5 7/16 × 4 3/16 in.)
Collection: Art Institute of Chicago
Artist: Grant Wood

Artist

Grant Wood

Painting

Grant Wood was an American painter who developed a distinctive representational style depicting rural Midwestern life and landscape. Working primarily in oil on beaverboard and canvas during the 1920s and 1930s, he created meticulously detailed scenes of farmland, small towns, and their inhabitants rendered with a formal precision that bordered on the decorative. His most celebrated work, American Gothic, became an iconic image of American regionalism. Wood's practice emerged from his engagement with European modernism, particularly German Neue Sachlichkeit, which he synthesized with a deeply specific observation of Iowa's agricultural terrain and social fabric.

Minneapolis–Saint Paul

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