The Pump
Grant Wood
1937
- Medium
- Black crayon, with touches of graphite, on cream wove card
- Dimensions
- 13.7 × 10.6 cm (5 7/16 × 4 3/16 in.)
- Genre
- crayon
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago
Tags
drawings (visual works)crayongraphiteprints and drawingcrayons
About
Grant Wood, famous for his representations of the Midwest—of which the Art Institute’s American Gothic (1930.934) is his most recognizable example—intended The Pump to be an illustration for Sinclair Lewis’s novel Main Street (1920). This image of a contemporary water pump would have been a perfect fit for Lewis’s novel about life in a midwestern town. The drawing was given to the Art Institute by Carter Manny, Jr., who received it as a high school graduation gift from the artist in 1937.
