Nan Graham; She Posed for Brother’s ‘American Gothic’

Nan Wood Graham, the model for the tight-lipped farm woman in the painting “American Gothic,” has died in a Menlo Park, Calif., nursing home at the age of 91.

The 1930 painting by her brother, artist Grant Wood, portrays a somber, pitchfork-bearing farmer, the late Dr. Byron McKeeby, and his equally somber daughter standing before a cottage in Eldon in southeast Iowa.

The painting initially provoked controversy in Cedar Rapids, where some women protested that Mrs. Graham was poking fun at them with her dour depiction of Iowa farm women. One woman wrote to say Mrs. Graham’s face would “sour milk.”

But the painting gained wide acceptance and her popularity soared in her home state.

If her brother had gone through with his original intention of using another model, the secretarial school graduate said, she would have whiled away her days as “the world’s worst stenographer.”

Instead, she once said, “Grant made a personality out of me. I would have had a very drab life without it.”

Born in Anamosa, Iowa, she attended Polk School and Washington High School in Cedar Rapids. In 1924, she married real estate investor Edward Graham. The couple, who had no children, lived all over the country, eventually settling in Riverside.

In 1984, widowed and going blind, Mrs. Graham entered a Menlo Park nursing home, ending a lifetime job as historian of her brother’s work. She died there Friday.