American Gothic, 1776

In the spring of 1776 John Adams was in Philadelphia arguing the colonies toward independence, and Abigail Adams was in Braintree, Massachusetts, running the farm, managing the accounts, and raising four children through a smallpox year. More than eleven hundred of their letters to each other survive. On 31 March 1776 she wrote to ask that the new code of laws remember the ladies. He answered with a joke, and she did not let it go.

Grant Wood painted American Gothic in 1930 after seeing a small white farmhouse with a pointed Gothic window in Eldon, Iowa. It hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago. His sister and his dentist posed for the farmer and his daughter, and the picture's power lies in its stillness: two upright figures, a pitchfork held like a staff, and a house whose window repeats the shape of their faces.

The farmhouse, the gable window and the two unsmiling faces are kept. John Adams stands in front in a brown coat and buff waistcoat, a long flintlock fowling piece held upright where the pitchfork was. Abigail stands a step behind him in a blue gown, a white kerchief crossed at her chest and pinned with a cameo, her gaze turned to the right. Behind them a barn, a stone wall, a bare tree and a row of bean poles complete the farm. The light is flat and even under a clear spring sky.

Wood's farmer held a pitchfork. This one holds a musket, and the woman beside him held the farm, the accounts and the argument.