Haying

1939

Grant Wood

Painter, American, 1891 - 1942

From a low vantage point, we look up along rolling, verdant farm fields bathed in sunlight that fill most of this nearly square canvas. Rows of stylized, gold-green hay almost fill landscape painting. The horizon line is high, almost at the top of the painting, and the hill in front of us slopes from the horizon down to a point far below us, at the bottom edge of the canvas. Along the hill, roughly parallel rows of harvested hay are bundled into distinctive tube-like mounds, with paths between them. The field is interrupted only by a small, solitary young tree near the lower left corner. Two muted, terracotta-red barns or outbuildings with pitched, tan-colored roofs perch at the top of the hill. They stand outlined against a light, clear blue sky at the top center of the composition. The canopies of several rounded trees puff up beyond the buildings, on the far side of the hill. A fan-like weathervane with flat, blade-like paddles sits atop the smaller barn. The other, larger building has a higher pitched roof with a small, lantern-shaped cupola on top and a wide door on the right side where the roof slopes down in a lean-to type of structure. A piece of farm machinery is parked in the field at the top right. At the bottom center of the canvas, a brown ceramic jug with a handle and red stopper rests on the ground in between the rows of bundled hay. The artist signed and dated the work with red paint in the bottom left corner: “GRANT WOOD 1939.” There is also a red painted copyright symbol to the left of the name.
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The Iowa painter Grant Wood, along with John Steuart Curry and Thomas Hart Benton, was one of the leading midwestern American regionalist painters. Created in 1939, just as the country was beginning to recover from the ravages of the Great Depression, Haying and its companion New Road are representative examples of the idealized landscapes of rural Iowa that the artist had begun to paint in 1930. They show no trace of the severe economic problems and natural disasters that had beset Iowa farmers for almost a decade. Using a detailed, deliberately naïve style, such works typically include the cultivated lands, farms, manual farm machinery, windmills, and domestic animals characteristic of Iowa. Haying and New Road serve as both optimistic celebrations of better times to come and subtle portrayals of the state of American life as it turned from the calamities of the 1930s to the even more ominous challenges of World War II. These subjects were also motivated in part by Wood’s rejection of the cultural hegemony that the urban Northeast held over the rest of the country and his belief that an artist has a special rapport with his own native area. Suspended in time and poised at a particularly fraught moment in the history of the country, they are replete with the ambiguities and subtle ironies that underlay Wood's seemingly benign, straightforward regionalist vision.

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Artwork overview

  • Medium

    oil on canvas on paperboard mounted on hardboard

  • Credit Line

    Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Irwin Strasburger

  • Dimensions

    overall: 32.8 x 37.7 cm (12 15/16 x 14 13/16 in.)
    framed: 53.3 x 58.4 cm (21 x 23 in.)

  • Accession

    1982.7.1

More About this Artwork

Article:  Modernist Barns and Modern Farmers

How Grant Wood, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Thomas Hart Benton depicted the humble structures—and how they mask the struggles of farmers today.

Article:  15 LGBTQ+ Artists to Know

Discover the lives of 15 LGBTQ+ artists and their art, much of which you can see at the National Gallery.

Scholarly Article:  American Paintings, 1900–1945: Haying, 1939

This nearly square painting shows an industrial area with buildings, storage silos, a smokestack, and railroad tracks. A mound of brown dirt or other material is in shadow in the lower left corner of the painting. Next to the mound, railroad tracks extend diagonally from the lower center of the painting into the distance to our right. The tracks end at a white building with staggered gray rooflines to our right in the distance. A tall terracotta-red smokestack rises high beyond the white building, smoke pouring out of its top and blending into the clouds above. Just beyond the mound of dirt, piles of white material, perhaps in unseen bins, line the railroad track to our left and lead back to a row ten interconnected, coral-orange silos. The horizon comes about halfway up the painting, and it is lined with a row of long white and gray warehouses. The artist signed and dated the work with brown paint in the lower right corner: “Sheeler 31.”

Scholarly Series:  American Paintings, 1900–1945

Artwork history & notes

Provenance

The artist; sold to Irwin [1880-1953] and Clara R. Sax [1889-1981] Strasburger, White Plains, New York, by 1944;[1] bequest 1982 to NGA.
[1] Darrell Garwood, Artist in Iowa: A Life of Grant Wood, New York, 1944: 222, 254.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1939

  • Fine Arts Festival, Memorial Union, University of Iowa, Cedar Rapids, 1939.

1981

  • John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood: A Portrait of Rural America, Cedar Rapids Art Center; Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University; Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Missouri-Columbia, 1981, fig. 149.

1985

  • America in Transition: Benton and His Contemporaries, 1920-1940, Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 1985.

1987

  • Extended loan for use by Vice President and Mrs. George Bush, Vice President's House, Washington, D.C., 1987-1989.

1990

  • Loan to display with permanent collection, Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, 1990-1991.

1991

  • One-Hundredth Birthday Anniversary Celebration, Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, 1991.

1994

  • Barn Again, National Building Museum, Washington, D.C., 1994, no catalogue.

1995

  • Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed, Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska; Davenport Museum of Art, Iowa; Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, 1995-1996, no. 55, pl. 9.

2008

  • Double Lives: American Painters as Illustrators, 1850-1950, Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford; New Britain Museum of American Art, 2008-2009, unnumbered catalogue.

2016

  • Grant Wood and the American Farm, Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, 2016, no catalogue.

2018

  • Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2018, no. 96, repro.

Bibliography

1971

  • Garwood, Darrell. Artist in Iowa: A Life of Grant Wood. (New York, 1944) Reprint Westport, CT, 1971: 222, 254.

1975

  • Dennis, James M. Grant Wood: A Study in American Art and Culture. New York, 1975: 93-94, color pl. 35.

1981

  • Czestochowski, Joseph S. John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood: A Portrait of Rural America. Columbia, MO, 1981: fig. 149.

1992

  • American Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1992: 384, repro.

1994

  • Schenker, Heath. “Picturing the Central Valley.” Landscape 32, no. 2 (1994): 8, repro.

1995

  • Roberts, Brady M., James M. Dennis et al. Grant Wood: An American Artist Revealed. Exh. cat. Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE; Davenport Museum of Art, IA, and the Worcester Art Museum, MA, 1995-1996. Davenport and San Francisco, 1995: 3, 73, color pl. 9.

2018

  • Haskell, Barbara, and Glenn Adamson. Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables. Exh. cat. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2018: 30, color pl. 96.

Inscriptions

lower left: © GRANT / WOOD / 1939

Wikidata ID

Q20193218

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