Christina's World

Artist Andrew Wyeth | Year 1948 | Type Tempera on gessoed panel

Dimensions: 81.9 cm × 121.3 cm (32¼ in × 47¾ in) | Location : Museum of Modern Art, New York City


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 and crawling towards 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 their permanent collection.As of July, 2010, the work is displayed outside of the main galleries in an "interstitial space" near the restrooms on the fifth floor.

The woman in the painting is Christina Olson (May 3, 1893 - January 27, 1968). She suffered from Polio, a muscular deterioration that paralyzed her lower body. Wyeth was inspired to create the painting when through a window from within the house he saw her crawling across a field. Wyeth had a summer home in the area and was on friendly terms with Olson,using her and her younger brother as the subject 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.

The house depicted in the painting is known as the Olson House, and is located in Cushing, Maine. It is open to the public as a part of the Farnsworth Museum complex; it is on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places, and has been restored to match its appearance in the painting.[citation needed] In the painting, Wyeth separated the house from its barn and changed the lay of the land.