Christina's World

Christina's World is a work by U.S. painter Andrew Wyeth, and one of the best-known American paintings of the middle 20th century. It depicts a seemingly young 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.

The woman of the painting is Christina Olson (May 3, 1893 - January 27, 1968). She had an undiagnosed 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. Although the woman in the painting appears young, Olson was 55 at the time Wyeth created the work.