Rural Plowing Landscape in the Steam Age

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A highly detailed oil painting by Grant Wood titled "Fall Plowing" shows a rural American landscape with rolling hills in various shades of green, brown, and ochre under a pale blue sky. In the foreground, a vibrant reddish-brown plowed field with distinct furrows dominates the bottom third of the canvas, partially obscured by a dark-toned harvesting machine with a black hose and a metallic part on the lower right, implying recent agricultural activity. Above this, a lighter-toned field is covered with numerous small, light-colored conical haystacks or corn shocks arranged in neat rows, casting long shadows to the right, suggesting the afternoon sun. To the left of this field, a large, rounded, earth-toned mound or hill rises, while on the right, several trees with dense, rounded canopies in yellow, orange, and reddish-brown hues are scattered across another sloping field. In the mid-ground, a red train with a black locomotive and tender is visible on a track that curves through the landscape, emitting thick white smoke that trails behind it across the sky. Another train, further in the distance, is also emitting smoke.

This is a merger of paintings by Grant Wood and Thomas Harte Benton, a couple of painters I have long admired. In my elementary school (Yankee Ridge) there was a print of a Grant Wood landscape not unlike this one. I had seen some of Benton's pictures but they never made a great impression until I was in the National Museum in Washington and came upon a large Benton work hanging in, of all places, a stair well and I was so struck by it that I could do little more then stand still and admire it. Eventually it turned out that there were other people wanting to use those stairs so I had to move along.