Jacques House

The small Des Moines River village of Eldon harbors probably the most widely known house in Iowa. This is the Jacques house, the small cottage Grant Wood used as a background for his well-known, often reproduced painting of 1930, American Gothic (now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago). The painter came across this dwelling when driving through Eldon, and he photographed it at the time. He used this photograph together with his sister Nan and his dentist, Dr. B. H. McKeeby, as models for the painting.

The board-and-batten one-and-a-half-story cottage is indeed what one would label as Gothic Revival. Its higher than normal gable roof encloses a single large pointed window, the same gable and arched window that assert themselves in the center of Wood's painting. It is interesting to note that the painter reduced the width of the window in order to accentuate the building's Gothic verticality. The L-shaped porch that wraps itself around the front and part of the left side of the cottage exhibits thin, turned-wood columns that we would usually associate not with the Gothic Revival, but rather with the Eastlake style. (Such combinations are, of course, quite common in American domestic architecture of the late 1860s through the 1880s.)