The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, 1931

In The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, Grant Wood casts a magical spell over a familiar American legend, drawing not from strict historical record but from the childhood memory of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1863 poem. Enchanted by the idea of a local hero racing through the night to warn his neighbors, Wood identified personally with Paul Revere’s mission, once imagining himself galloping across Iowa farms to warn of an approaching tornado. Though he never became such a hero, he achieved immortality through his art, particularly American Gothic (1930), painted just a year earlier. 

A self-consciously “primitive” painter influenced by American folk art, Wood used simplified forms, bold lighting, and a bird’s-eye perspective to create a scene that feels like a child’s dream: the village resembles a toy town of geometric houses and spherical trees, the moonlight glows theatrically bright, and Revere’s horse appears almost like a rocking horse. Rather than mocking the legend, Wood sought to preserve what he called those “bits of American folklore that are too good to lose,” believing that art could forge and sustain a national identity. Painted during the Great Depression, when confidence in America’s vitality was wavering and modern art was turning toward abstraction, Wood’s work deliberately linked past and present, defending a distinctly American artistic vision rooted in shared history and myth.