Art by Grant Wood

Wood's 1930 painting American Gothic, a stern farmer holding a pitchfork beside a woman standing slightly behind him in front of a white farmhouse, became one of the most parodied images in American art almost immediately, endlessly reproduced with the two figures swapped out for celebrities, politicians, and cartoon characters. The models were, in fact, his own sister Nan and his dentist, not an actual married farming couple as many assumed. Wood, a key figure in the American regionalist movement centered on Iowa, insisted the painting was a sincere, respectful portrait of Midwestern character, though audiences at the time and since have often read it as gentle satire instead, a disagreement that's never really been settled.