Grant Wood painted New Road, along with its companion Haying, specifically to be exhibited at a fine arts festival at the University of Iowa in Cedar Rapids. ^[1] It is an idealized view of the rolling hills dotted with trees, farm buildings, windmills, and grazing animals characteristic of the rural Iowa landscape on the route between Cedar Rapids and Lake Macbride. A rustic sign at the upper right inscribed “SOLON 5 MI” indicates that the gravel motorway leads to Solon, a small city in Johnson County in eastern Iowa just south of Cedar Rapids. The intersection near the center of the composition echoes the cruciform pattern of the signpost. The dramatic vantage point looking directly down the steeply descending road imbues the bucolic scene with a sense of excitement that complements the uphill view of Haying. Brady Roberts has noted that New Road also “exhibits similar pointillist tendencies, especially in the sky, rendered with a vibrant network of fine pink, red, and violet brush strokes on a blue background.” ^[2]

According to a 1938 travel guide to Iowa, in 1919 a federally funded road building project was instituted that “provided for highway improvements, and advanced the cause of good roads.” A paving program was begun five years later, and by 1937 “there were 5,455 miles of paved highways out of a total of 102,533 miles of roads.” The author concluded that because of these improvements “Iowa has at last ‘come out of the mud.’” ^[3] Although New Road conveys a similar message of civic pride by representing recently initiated improvements, James Dennis has noted that the composition “excludes any sign of the automobile for which the graded curve and the intersection at the bottom of the hill had been expressly engineered.” ^[4] This is consistent with the conspicuous absence of motorized farm machinery in Wood’s landscapes and reflects his distrust of cars, a personal eccentricity that is manifested in Death on the Ridge Road (1934, Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts). ^[5]

Suspended somewhere between an agrarian past and a mechanistic future, New Road depicts the country as literally and figuratively approaching a crossroads, a fateful turning point between the calamities of the 1930s and what would prove to be the even more ominous, existential challenges of World War II. This interpretive framework suggests the significance of the sign to Solon in New Road, a reference to the classical Greek statesman and poet Solon who fought corruption and championed the rise of democracy in Athens.

The support consists of a medium-weight, plain-weave, double-threaded canvas mounted on paperboard that the artist adhered directly to the smooth side of a Masonite panel. This Masonite is clearly original as original paint extends over the edges of the fabric onto the underlying Masonite. The characteristics of the paint application are otherwise identical to its companion piece Haying. A similar typed label attached to the reverse reads: "THIS PAINTING IS SOLD WITH THE UNDERSTANDING THAT I RESERVE THE RIGHT TO MAKE A LARGER PAINTING OF THE SCENE IF I SO DESIRE. GRANT WOOD." The fabric texture is visible through the thin, white ground layer. Paint (estimated to be oil but may also be tempera or a tempera mixture) has mostly been built up in thinly applied opaque to transparent fine hatching strokes and dabs. At some point glass was placed directly on the paint surface and got stuck, resulting in minor losses when it was removed. Infrared examination of the painting showed an underdrawing of the outline of the hill and possible changes to the position of the sign. ^[6] There is no surface coating. The original light wood frame was probably made by Wood or an assistant.