Christina's World (Andrew Wyeth)

Christina's World by A Wyeth

The Painter

The Scenery

Christina

The Painting

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By Renée Maufroid

Andrew Wyeth 1917-2009

Andrew Newell Wyeth (1917 – 2009) is one of the most popular American painters of the twentieth-century. At first, he was a realist painter, he was sometimes referred to as the "Painter of the People," due to his work's popularity with the American public. In his art, Wyeth's favorite subjects were the land and people around him, in his hometown Pennsylvania, and at his summer home in Cushing, Maine.

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The painting

In 1948 Andrew Wyeth began painting Christina Olson. For months he worked on nothing but the grass; then, much more quickly he painted the buildings at the top of the hill. Finally, he came to the character.When he had finished, Wyeth hung the painting over his sofa in his living room. Visitors hardly glanced at it. After a few weeks the painting was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). it was hung there in December 1948, and thousands of visitors related to it in a personal way, it became one of the most popular works in the museum.

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The house depicted in the painting is known as the Olson' house, it is in Maine. Look carefully at the place, the roof is damaged and there is a ladder against the front of the house, but no one there using it. The windows are closed even though it's Summer so it seems that the house is abandoned. There appears to be a piece of clothing on the laundry line, but we don't know what it is exactly. The hill is steep...

The Scenery

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Christina

She was 31 when Wyeth painted his neighbor in South Cushing, Maine. Her name was Anna Christina Olson. She suffered from a desease that prevented her from walking.She didn't use a a wheelchair, she crawled around her home and the surrounding grounds, as seen in Christina's World. Wyeth said "If in some small way I have been able in paint to make the viewer sense that her world may be limited physically but by no means spiritually, then I have achieved what I set out to do."

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