Indomitable Vision

Some models are so famous and sought after that they appear in the works of painter after painter, and their names, like Suzanne Valadon or Kiki of Montparnasse, become almost bywords for an epoch. Their faces and bodies become familiar, delineated as they were by brush after brush, but America's best-known model may well be remembered for one view, and that of the back of her head. Her middle name is the title of one of the all-time bestselling reproductions, Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World.

She was, in fact, Anna Christina Olson, and until her death last week of a heart attack at the age of 74, very few people had ever seen her in person, although millions know her from Wyeth's work. A reclusive spinster who lived in a weatherbeaten grey homestead in Cushing, Me., up the road a piece from the house in which Wyeth and his family have summered for many years, Christina Olson was severely crippled by polio in childhood. Nonetheless, she supported herself for most of her life as a seamstress, earned a local reputation as a fine cook. She was so fiercely independent that she disdained crutches, declined offers of a wheelchair from the local March of Dimes, preferred instead to hitch herself about the house on a conventional chair.

Glimpse from the Window. Wyeth met her many years ago, through his wife Betsy, who as a child had stayed at a house on the Olson property. He became deeply attached to Christina, marveling at her bedrock dignity and pride, enthralled--as perhaps only a painter could be--with the gothic romance of her witchlike features, piercing eyes, and scraggly hair. "To me," he once remarked, "she is the essence of New England--witchcraft. She rules like a queen, absolutely."

The haunting image that Wyeth captured in Christina's World was inspired by an upstairs-window glimpse he had of her, then aged 55, picking berries in a field outside. But to render it was not easy. For months he painted only the landscape and Christina's own house in the background, finally asked her if he might sketch her, drew her arms and hands. "I was so shy about posing her, I got my wife Betsy to pose for the figure," Wyeth confessed. The painting, finished in 1948, was sold to Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art for $2,200, rapidly became the museum's most popular reproduction; it has since netted more than $250,000.

Untrammeled Spirit. Wyeth returned to paint Christina Olson many times, cradling a kitten in her arms, or sitting on her porch. He painted her house 50 times, and an upstairs room in it in Wind from the Sea, which shows the curtains billowing as Wyeth once saw them, when a long-closed window was suddenly thrown open. His last portrait, titled Anna Christina, was completed last summer.

Wyeth liked to say that in Christina's World, "I could have done just as well without having the figure in it." In one sense, he was right. The painting is primarily an invocation of a landscape as vast and indomitable as the universe, a physical expression of an untrammeled spirit that refused to be cowed by illness or suffering. Still, as Wyeth said last week, "she was the reason for it." He and his son Nicholas were chief among the mourners who laid Christina Olson to rest in the family burial plot, just 400 yards across Christina's field from her home.

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