Christina's World

Christina's World is a 1948 painting by American painter Andrew Wyeth, and one of the best-known American paintings of the middle 20th century. It depicts a woman lying 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.

This tempera work, done in a realist style, is currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as a part of its permanent collection.

Background

The woman in the painting is Anna Christina Olson (3 May 1893 – 27 January 1968). She is known to have suffered from polio, a muscular deterioration that paralyzed her lower body. 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. Wyeth 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. Although Olson was the inspiration and subject of the painting, she was not the primary model — Wyeth's wife Betsy posed as the torso of the painting. Olson was 55 at the time Wyeth created the work.