Andrew Wyeth's famous painting "Christina's World" shows a crippled woman dragging herself across a field toward a farmhouse. A tour of the house, which was declared a National Historic Landmark June 30, offers a fascinating, in-depth look at the real world of Christina Olson and her family, and also reveals the story of Wyeth's relationship with them.
Wyeth spent 30 years producing some 300 works of art depicting the Olsons and their home in Cushing, Maine. This summer and fall offer a rare opportunity to see 50 of those paintings and drawings at the Farnsworth Art Museum's Wyeth Center in the nearby town of Rockland, where they are on loan from Marunuma Art Park in Asaka, Japan, through Oct. 30, in a show called "Andrew Wyeth, Christina's World and the Olson House."
The original "Christina's World" painting is owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, but visiting the Olson House and the Farnsworth Art Museum allows you to stand in the artist's footsteps and see Christina's life as Wyeth beheld it. Looking out the windows of the upstairs bedrooms where he set up his easel, you see the field he depicted in the famous painting. You can even feel the breeze blowing through the window where he saw a tattered curtain that became the subject of another painting.
Heidi Chester of Hancock, N.H., visited the house and the Farnsworth last fall on a trip with her husband to midcoast Maine to celebrate a wedding anniversary. "My husband is a fancier of historic homes and I'm an artist, so I was really into seeing Wyeth's work," said Chester, who has an online business selling painted glassware and later blogged about her trip. "The sense of intimacy you have with the family and the painter is really remarkable. ... You're basically standing in the same place he was standing when he looked out the window and did the scene or did the sketches. You're seeing the same details. It's like you get a chance to be the artist. You're going back to that moment."
One of the most interesting artifacts in the house is an old wood stove by the kitchen door. A painting of Christina sitting by that stove is part of the Marunuma exhibit. As tour guide Nancy Harris put it, the kitchen of the house "truly was Christina's world." It's where Christina sat, greeting visitors and passers-by; it's where she and her brother huddled during cold Maine winters. The stove was used both for cooking and heating.
The first two floors of the house were built by Christina's maternal ancestors in the late 18th century; the third floor was added in 1871. Although Alvaro and Christina lived until the late 1960s, dying within a month of each other, the impoverished siblings never had running water or a phone. They are buried in a private cemetery across the road; Wyeth was buried there in 2009.
