A Church Window for Catherine from the Sears & Roebuck Catalog

A short piece up the hill from the Des Moines River, Charles Dibble erected a home for his wife Catherine and eight children. Orange Daylilies from Asia and Gothic-style windows were the fashion of the time. Catherine wanted a church window. About 40 years later, an Iowa gallerist and some painters happened by the house. Grant Wood immortalized the 'form of borrowed pretentiousness, a structural absurdity' in his painting American Gothic. A Church Window for Catherine is my whimsical prologue to Wood's painting....