Grant Wood sold ‘American Gothic’ for $300 in 1930. That's about $6,000 today.

Grant Wood made a modest living in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He taught art, did craft work and decorated rooms. In 1930 he painted his sister and his dentist standing in front of a small white house. A museum support group bought the picture for $300 and gave it to the Art Institute of Chicago. The Journal says that's about $6,000 today. The painting is ‘American Gothic.’

Barbara Spindel reviews ‘The Couple With the Pitchfork’ by Wanda M. Corn in the weekend Journal. Corn, an emeritus art-history professor at Stanford, has collected copies and parodies of the image for almost 60 years. She calls the painting "an accidental masterpiece." Wood meant it as a father and his grown daughter in a small town. Nobody saw that. Everyone took the pair for a farm couple. The models were more than 30 years apart in age, and Wood said so. It didn't help.

Many Iowans hated it. They thought he was mocking them. Wood had to declare himself a loyal Iowan in public. Fans of modern European art weren't kind either. Next to Picasso, they called his realism old-fashioned. One of Corn's own professors in the 1960s told her Wood wasn't worth studying. She ignored him. Wood died at 50 in 1942. His sister took up the fight after that.

The price and the value

Few images on earth are better known today. The reviewer puts it next to the ‘Mona Lisa.’ Iowa named schools for Wood. The state owns the house in Eldon that inspired the painting. Visitors can borrow costumes and a pitchfork and pose. New parodies land in Corn's inbox every week. And the artist got $300.

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This is Time Value of Money (M3), with a lesson for anyone's career. Two things happened to that $300. First, inflation ate it. The same dollars buy about what $6,000 buys now. That's 20 times the number, just to stand still (6,000 divided by 300). Second, the painting's worth to the world went somewhere no number can follow. Wood was paid once. The value kept growing for everyone else. That gap shows up in ordinary lives too. The one-time price you accept for your work, your business or your buyout is rarely the value it goes on to create. It's worth knowing that before you sign.

Here's the piece of your own plan this touches. Cash that sits still does what Wood's $300 did. It keeps its face value and loses its buying power. Check your emergency fund this week. Find the rate it earns and set it next to the price increases you've felt at the store. If the money isn't at least keeping pace, and it fits your plan, move it to an account that does, while nothing is on fire. We'd rather have that talk on a quiet week than after the gap has grown.