BREATHNAIGH

“When I first painted it in 1918, Christina’s World hung all summer in my house in Maine and nobody particularly reacted to it. I thought, “Boy, is this one ever a flat tire.” Now I get at least a letter a week from all over the world, usually wanting to know what she’s doing. Actually there isn’t any definite story. The way this tempera happened, I was in an upstairs room in the Olson house and saw Christine crawling in the field. Later, I went down on the road and made a pencil drawing of the house but I never went down into the field. You see my memory was more of a reality than the thing itself. I didn’t put Christine in till the very end. I worked on the hill for months, that brown grass, and kept thinking about her in her pink dress like a faded lobster shell I might find on the beach, crumpled. Finally I got up enough courage to say to her, “Would you mind if I made a drawing of you sitting outside?” and I drew her crippled arms and hands. Finally, I was so shy about posing her. I got my wife Betsy to pose for the figure. Then it came time to lay in Christine’s figure against that planet I’d created for her all those weeks. I put this pink tone on her shoulder—and it almost blew me across the room.”

—Andrew Wyeth, 1965

Andrew Wyeth, Willard’s Coat, via Mister Crew.