Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009) is per­haps not a wide­ly known name out­side of the States, but he was one of the greats of mid­dle 20th cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can art. His oeu­vre was Amer­i­can Region­al­ism, the real­ist art move­ment that depict­ed scenes from the rur­al, small-town Amer­i­ca of the Mid­west. Land and peo­ple, paint­ed by an artist with an appre­ci­a­tion for nature and the abil­i­ty to fire the imag­i­na­tion. He was born in Chadds Ford, Penn­syl­va­nia, into an estab­lished art-ori­ent­ed fam­i­ly, his father being the cel­e­brat­ed artist and illus­tra­tor N C Wyeth. Andrew was brought up on the art of Winslow Homer, the poet­ry of Robert Frost and the writ­ings of Hen­ry David Thore­au, and was thus inspired intel­lec­tu­al­ly as well as artis­ti­cal­ly.

One of Wyeth’s best-known works is his tem­pera paint­ing Christi­na’s World, which is held in the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art (MoMA) in New York; it was paint­ed in 1948, when he was 31 years old. The work depicts his neigh­bour, Christi­na Olson, sprawled on a dry field fac­ing her house in the dis­tance, in Cush­ing, Maine. Christi­na had a degen­er­a­tive mus­cu­lar dis­or­der that ren­dered her unable to walk, and she spent most of her time at home. She was firm­ly against using a wheel­chair and so would crawl every­where, and Wyeth was inspired to cre­ate the paint­ing when he saw her crawl­ing across the field.

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 MoMA, bought the paint­ing for $1,800 and it grad­u­al­ly grew in pop­u­lar­i­ty to the point that today, it is con­sid­ered an icon of Amer­i­can art. The Olson house itself has been pre­served and ren­o­vat­ed to match its appear­ance in Christi­na’s World, and because of Wyeth’s pro­file, it was des­ig­nat­ed a Nation­al His­toric Land­mark in June 2011.