Christina’s World (painting)

Christina’s World. A 1948 painting by American painter Andrew Wyeth and one of the best-known American paintings of the mid-20th century. It is a tempera work done in a realist style, depicting a woman in an incline position on the ground in a treeless, mostly tawny field, looking up at a gray house on the horizon, a barn, and various other small outbuildings are adjacent to the house. It is held by the Museum of Modern Art, in New York.

Background

The woman in the painting is Anna Christina Olson (1893 – 1968). Anna had a degenerative muscular disorder, possibly polio, which left her unable to walk. She was firmly against using a wheelchair and so would crawl everywhere.

Wyeth was inspired to create the painting when he saw her crawling across a field while he was watching from a window in the house. He had a summer home in the area and was on friendly terms with Olson, using her and her younger brother as the subjects of paintings from 1940 to 1968. Olson was the inspiration and subject of the painting, but she was not the primary model; Wyeth‘s wife Betsy posed as the torso of the painting. Olson was 55 at the time that Wyeth created the work.

The house depicted in the painting is known as the Olson House in Cushing, Maine, and is open to the public, operated by the Farnsworth Art Museum. It is a National Historic Landmark and has been restored to match its appearance in the painting, although Wyeth separated the house from its barn and changed the lay of the land for the painting. Wyeth is buried in the nearby Olson family graveyard.

Reception and history

Christina’s World was first exhibited at the Macbeth Gallery in Manhattan in 1948. It received little attention from critics at the time, but Alfred Barr, the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), bought the painting for $1,800 (equivalent to $18,200 in 2023 dollars). He promoted it at MoMA, and it gradually grew in popularity. Today, it is considered an icon of American art and is rarely loaned out by the museum.