Nan Wood Graham

Nan Wood Graham

Nan Wood Graham was the sister of painter Grant Wood. She is best known as the model for the woman in her brother’s most famous painting, American Gothic. Graham was born on July 26, 1899, on a farm near Anamosa, Iowa. She married real estate broker and investor Edward Graham in 1924.

About Nan Wood Graham in brief

Summary Nan Wood GrahamNan Wood Graham was the sister of painter Grant Wood. She is best known as the model for the woman in her brother’s most famous painting, American Gothic. Graham was born on July 26, 1899, on a farm near Anamosa, Iowa. She married real estate broker and investor Edward Graham in 1924. She later made around 20 scrapbooks of Grant’s life which were microfilmed by the Archives of American Art within the Smithsonian Institution.

In 1984, she was nearing blindness and moved to a nursing home, later dying there on December 14, 1990. In 1993, her memoir, My Brother, Grant Wood, was posthumously published by the State Historical Society of Iowa.