Grant Devolson Wood was born on February 13, 1891, on a farm near Anamosa, Iowa, and from a young age wanted to be an artist. He made his first drawing in the farm cellar after being sent there as punishment, sketching a hen sitting on a pile of eggs on a piece of cardboard from a cracker box. After his father died when Wood was 10, the family moved to Cedar Rapids, where he continued developing his artistic skill and won a Crayola coloring contest in the early 1900s, encouraging him to pursue art as a career. The day he graduated from high school, he left Cedar Rapids to attend the Arts and Crafts Guild in Minneapolis, then became a professional craftsman in the Guild's shop. After leaving in 1911, he worked on a farm for the Woitesheck sisters about 30 miles from Cedar Rapids and later taught at a country school after obtaining a teaching license. While pursuing these different careers, he continued building his artistic skill, opening his own jewelry and copper workshop in 1912, taking a life-drawing class at the University of Iowa without officially registering, and spending time at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1913. He entered the military in 1918, painted camouflage on cannons, and earned extra money by sketching fellow soldiers in his spare time. In 1920 he traveled to Europe with his friend and fellow artist Marvin Cone to study art, studied at the Academie Julien in Paris for a year in 1923, and returned to France in 1926 to experiment with Impressionist and Post-Impressionist work. In 1927 he was commissioned to design a stained glass window for the Veterans Memorial Building in Cedar Rapids and traveled to Munich to oversee its creation, where he became drawn to the realistic sense of German Gothic painters, an experience that changed his artistic style forever. Before Munich, his work reflected Impressionism, but he later called his new style decorative, later coined Regionalism, combining elements of German realism with simplified forms such as rounded trees and hills, as shown in Young Corn, 1931.