BACKGROUND INFORMATION In August 1930, Grant Wood, an American painter with European training, was driven around Eldon, Iowa, by a young painter from Eldon, John Sharp. Looking for inspiration, Wood noticed the Dibble House, a small white house built in the Carpenter Gothic architectural style.

Sharp's brother suggested in 1973 that it was on this drive that Wood first sketched the house on the back of an envelope. Wood's earliest biographer, Darrell Garwood, noted that Wood "thought it a form of borrowed pretentiousness, a structural absurdity, to put a Gothic-style window in such a flimsy frame house". At the time, Wood classified it as one of the "cardboardy frame houses on Iowa farms" and considered it "very paintable". After obtaining permission from the Jones family, the house's owners, Wood made a sketch the next day in oil on paperboard from the house's front yard. This sketch displayed a steeper roof and a longer window with a more pronounced ogive than on the actual house, features which eventually adorned the final work.

Wood decided to paint the house along with "the kind of people I fancied should live in that house". He recruited his sister Nan (1899–1990) to be the model for the daughter, dressing her in a colonial print apron mimicking 20th-century rural Americana. The model for the father was the Wood family dentist, Dr. Byron McKeeby (1867–1950) from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Nan told people that her brother had envisioned the couple as father and daughter, not husband and wife, which Wood himself confirmed ("The prim lady with him is his grown-up daughter") in his letter to a Mrs. Nellie Sudduth in 1941.

Elements of the painting stress the vertical that is associated with Gothic architecture. The three-pronged pitchfork is echoed in the stitching of the man's overalls, the Gothic window of the house, and the structure of the man's face. However, Wood did not add figures to his sketch until he returned to his studio in Cedar Rapids. He would not return to Eldon again before his death in 1942, although he did request a photograph of the home to complete his painting.

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