By Andrew Wyeth
it depicts Anna Christina Olson, who lived on a farm near Wyeth’s vacation home in Maine. The house in the top right of the painting is her home. Anna Christina had CMT disease, which caused weakness in leg/feet muscles, as well as lack of coordination in hands, wrists, fingers, and tongue. Due to the disease, Anna Christina was disabled from the waist down and moved around the property by crawling/dragging herself with her arms. The painting is meant to convey how bleak, hopeless, and desperate her situation seemed to be from an onlooker’s perspective, but “Christina’s World” is more than physical limitations. She may have to struggle to do basic things like get around her farm, but her world is still vast and open. There are no boundaries. She can and will get where she wants to go. Nothing will stop her. She seems to have a long way to go to get back to her home, but the painting shows how far she was able to get away from it on her own, by choice.