116 3rd St SE
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
Time Machine: Grant Wood’s ‘Fruits of Iowa’
Hotel Montrose owner hired artist to paint 7 scenes for hotel coffee shop in 1932
The new first-class hotel rising on Third Avenue and Third Street SE in Cedar Rapids in 1905 didn’t have a name.
Its architect was local: Josselyn & Taylor. Its investment company was local, headed by A.T. Averill, J.T. Hamilton, S.G. Armstrong and Lew W. Anderson.
Locals wondered it the new hotel might be named “The Averill” or “The Douglas” in honor of two prominent businessmen in the city. Or “The Hubbard,” for Judge Hubbard who loved good hotels?
For a while, it was simply called “the New Third Avenue Hotel.” Construction commenced Nov. 1, 1903. The hotel was completed in 1906.
Charles McHugh and J.E. Montrose, who already operated hotels in Rock Island and Peoria, Ill., leased the new hotel in 1904. Soon after, they named it Hotel Montrose.
It was considered one of the best hotels in the state in 1917 when Eugene Eppley leased it to add to his hotel chain.
Eppley converted the hotel’s billiard room into a large cafe next to the existing coffee room. A cafe on the mezzanine was turned into a banquet and ballroom. Most of the remodeling was completed by July 1920.
Hiring Grant Wood
In 1926, Eppley hired artists Grant Wood and Edgar Britton to redecorate the hotel’s Corn Room with murals of the Iowa countryside. The artists also were hired to paint murals for a new Corn Room in the Martin Hotel in Sioux City. (That Cedar Rapids mural was declared unsalvageable in 1958 and destroyed.)
When Eppley decided to redecorate the hotel in 1932, he asked Wood to come up with something for the coffee shop. Wood’s mural, consisting of seven paintings depicting farm life, was titled “Fruits of Iowa.”
The paintings were “Boy Milking Cow,” “Farmer’s Daughter with Vegetables,” “Farmer’s Son with Watermelon,” “Farmer’s Wife with Chickens,” “Farmer with Pigs and Corn,” “Iowa Farm Landscape” and “Fruit Basket.”
In 1940, the Montrose was facing redecoration again. Wood’s coffee shop murals were removed, remounted and framed and sent on tour of the Eppley Hotel chain.
When Wood died in February 1942, the hotel’s new mezzanine became home for “Fruits of Iowa.”
The remodel was featured in trade magazines, and hoteliers visited Cedar Rapids to see the renovations and the Wood paintings. The reports said Eppley was one of the first to recognize Wood’s genius.
Eppley’s Montrose ads touted “the $50,000 Art Gallery Collection of Paintings by the late Grant Wood.” The paintings increased in value and Eppley entertained some reportedly “near-fabulous offers” for them.
Paintings to Coe
The Eppley hotels were acquired by Sheraton Corp. in May 1956. Sheraton renovated the hotel and wanted the Wood paintings removed because they didn’t fit the new owner’s decorating theme.
Eppley had retained ownership of the “Fruits of Iowa” paintings and was going to ship them to the Eppley Foundation in Omaha. But many Cedar Rapidians, after learning the paintings were to leave Cedar Rapids, called and wrote the foundation, asking that the artwork remain in the city.
In October 1957, the foundation offered the seven paintings to Coe College on indefinite loan. They were hung in Coe’s Stewart Memorial Library in January 1958.
Eppley died in October 1958, and the paintings remained at Coe on loan.
When the Eppley Foundation was being dissolved in 1975, another letter-writing campaign advocated the paintings remain at Coe. The foundation in 1976 transferred ownership of “The Fruits of Iowa” to Coe.
The Hotel Montrose closed Dec. 1, 1981, and was razed in 1988.
The murals figured in a 1991 lawsuit when a California ad agency used stylized, but recognizable, versions of four of them in a campaign. That’s when Coe learned the paintings were not copyrighted. Coe art professor Robert Kocherr said, “Obviously, if we have images that are becoming very popular, we ought to have control over how they are used.”
Coe faced another controversy over “The Fruits of Iowa” in 2019 when auditors determined the donation of the paintings had been misclassified as an “unrestricted gift” that might be sold and added to the school’s endowment. The paintings were reclassified as “restricted,” and Coe’s endowment dropped by $5.4 million as a result.
The paintings continue to hang in the Stewart Memorial Library today.
Comments: D.fannonlangton@gmail.com
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