Grant Wood, “The Birthplace of Herbert Hoover, West Branch, Iowa”, Oil on Composition Board, 1931, The John R. Van Derlip Fund; owned jointly with the Des Moines Art Center
Wood places the viewer at the crest of a steep hill, looking down into a green valley where a tour guide points to a small cottage beside a larger white house. But this is not an ordinary cottage – it is the place where Herbert Hoover was born.
Typical of Grant Wood’s Regionalist style, everything is neat and regimented, evoking the simplified forms of American folk art. Many tiny straight brushstrokes define the trim lawns, creating a rhythmic pattern across much of the painting, and patterned clumps of enormous autumnal leaves define the trees. Unrealistically, all of the forms, whether close or distant, are bathed in the same clear light and described with the same precise detail.
Wood did not re-create the scene as it may have looked at the president’s birth. Instead he painted it as the tourist attraction it had become. Upon Hoover’s election to the presidency, the ordinary cottage, which had been turned into a kitchen by later owners, began to attract visitors from all over the country. The owner of the cottage charged visitors ten cents for tours of it and set up a souvenir stand. Wood included a sign in front of the house and a pink rock in which the Daughters of the American Revolution had placed a plaque identifying the house as Hoover’s birthplace.