THE NORMAN WAIT HARRIS PRIZE MEDAL

Established in 1902, the Norman Wait Harris Prize was a medal and cash prize awarded to an artist for a painting displayed in the Art Institute of Chicago's annual exhibition of American paintings and sculpture. Both a Silver Medal and a Bronze Medal were presented annually, and in 1936 the Bronze Medal was awarded to leading Ashcan School painter William James Glackens for his painting The Soda Fountain (1935; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts). The obverse of the medal bears an allegorical representation of the art of painting, a classically garbed figure holding a palette and brushes. She stands in an architectural entranceway with a cloud-filled sky behind her. The reverse depicts the central façade of the Art Institute of Chicago, with oak and laurel branches flanking the central inscription.

 
Norman Wait Harris Prize medal in silver

In 1930, an unknown American painter named Grant Wood decided to send one of his pictures to the juried annual open exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. Much to his delight, he won a prize, the Norman Wait Harris Bronze Medal, and with it $300 in cash: no mean sum for a struggling artist in his late twenties, born and raised on a remote farm in Iowa, trying to make his way in the provincial wilds of the American Midwest at the outset of the Great Depression.

Little did he know, but that bronze medal marked the beginning of one of the unlikeliest stories in the history of art. Wood's prizewinning picture, portraying a hard-bitten farming couple and entitled American Gothic, was soon to be championed as the masterpiece of a new American art movement called ‘Regionalism', first invented, and then promoted, by an impresario and art dealer from Kansas named Maynard Walker.

According to Walker, whose words carried influence, such work represented a robust all-American riposte to the ‘shiploads of rubbish that had been imported from the School of Paris' by the effete and gullible art collectors of New York. In American Gothic he saw a picture that dared to present real Americans, in all their true grit, to American eyes.

It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that American Gothic has become the USA's answer to the Mona Lisa: the one picture that every American recognises, without necessarily knowing anything about its maker, his motives, or the mystery that still clings to it.

To read the complete article, see:
American Gothic: Grant Wood's Midwestern mystery (https://www.christies.com/en/stories/american-gothic-a-midwestern-mystery-37605e6e8e7d4499847f7cf08a09b9fc)

References:
The models for the painting ‘American Gothic' were the artist's sister and dentist. (https://interestingfacts.com/fact/the-models-for-the-painting-american-gothic-were-the-artists-sister-and-dentist/)
Norman Wait Harris Prize Medal by Victor David Brenner (https://beta.medallicartcollector.com/glossary/awards/art-institute-chicago)
Norman Wait Harris Prize medal (https://www.artic.edu/artworks/146351/norman-wait-harris-prize-medal)
Standing Liberty Quarters (1916-1930) (https://www.ngccoin.com/coin-explorer/united-states/quarters/standing-liberty-quarters-1916-1930/)

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