Christina Olson, a summer neighbour of the Wyeth's' in Cushing, Maine, was crippled by infantile paralysis. Wyeth came upon her one day near the family burying ground looking at her house from the wide field in front of it. From the memory if this incident he developed the tempera painting. He also painted her in 1947 seated on the threshold of her open doorway. The three-story, clapboard farmhouse with its steep, shingled roof crowned by twin slim chimneys above two dormer windows, stands unadorned at the edge of a field.
Sunlight strikes it obliquely from the right.
At the right, adjoining the house, are an ell and two sheds. The drawing is a preliminary study of the farmhouse which appears at the upper right of the painting Christina's World . Andrew Wyeth Wyeth's father, N.C. Wyeth, was a well-known illustrator who had studied under Howard Pyle and who served as his son's only teacher. Andrew Wyeth presented his first one-man show in New York City in 1937. The subject matter of Wyeth's pictures comes almost entirely from two localities, the Brandywine Valley around Chadds Ford and the area near his summer home in Cushing, Maine.