Christina's World is a 1948 painting by American painter Andrew Wyeth and one of the best-known American paintings of the middle 20th century. It is a tempera work done in a realist style, depicting a woman semi-reclining on the ground in a treeless, mostly tawny field, looking up at a gray house on the horizon; a barn and various other small outbuildings are adjacent to the house. It is owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York as part of its permanent collection.


The woman in the painting is Anna Christina Olson (3 May 1893 – 27 January 1968). She probably suffered from Charcot–Marie–Tooth disease, a genetic polyneuropathy. Wyeth was inspired to create the painting when he saw her crawling across a field while he was watching from a window in the house. He had a summer home in the area and was on friendly terms with Olson, using her and her younger brother as the subjects of paintings from 1940 to 1968. Olson was the inspiration and subject of the painting but she was not the primary model; Wyeth's wife Betsy posed as the torso of the painting. Olson was 55 at the time that Wyeth created the work.


The house depicted in the painting is known as the Olson House in Cushing, Maine and is open to the public, operated by the Farnsworth Art Museum. It is a National Historic Landmark and has been restored to match its appearance in the painting, although Wyeth separated the house from its barn and changed the lay of the land for the painting.


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 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), bought the painting for $1,800. He promoted it at MoMA and it gradually grew in popularity over the years. Today, it is considered an icon of American art and is rarely loaned out by the museum.


It is often perceived as the embodiment of a strong sense of longing.


In Arthur C. Clarke's novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, Christina's World is one of the two paintings (the other one being Vincent van Gogh's Bridge at Arles) hanging on the living room wall of "an elegant, anonymous hotel suite" to which the astronaut David Bowman is transported after passing through the Star Gate. It does not appear in the film adaptation directed by Stanley Kubrick.


In issue #28 of Garth Ennis's comics series Preacher, Jesse Custer is sitting in front of the painting in the MoMA, examining it. In issue #43, the story of which is titled "Christina's World", Jesse relates his visit to the museum to his mother, Christina L'Angell, who explains to him that when she first discovered the painting in a book, she thought Wyeth had painted her own life. In addition, the cover to issue #43 by artist Glenn Fabry is a variation of Christina's World, with Christina in the role of Anna Christina Olson.

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