The Observer’s Artists’ Travels special in 1989 journeyed from van Gogh’s Arles to Turner’s Alps and Klee’s Tunisia. William Feaver didn’t have quite as good a gig as the lucky journalist retracing Gauguin’s South Seas steps, but his exploration of Grant Wood’s Midwest was born of a childhood obsession. A picturebook image of Wood’s Stone City had captivated him. In it, the 1930s Iowa boomtown ‘looks such a secret sort of place, unnaturally tidy, with hills folding away behind the mirror river, trees gobstopper smooth and wind pumps completing every set of farm buildings’. How would reality match up when he reached Stone City, ‘cosily in the middle of nowhere’?
