In 1948 Andrew Wyeth created the painting Christina’s World which is one of his most famous works of art. The woman lying on the ground, facing a farmhouse and barn, was his neighbor and muse, Anna Christina Olson.
While the painting has the appearance of a romantic scene, she actually suffered from a muscle disorder, which might have been polio or CMT, and would drag herself across the fields on her farm. She preferred to crawl using her arms to drag her body rather than use a wheelchair.
In talking about the painting, Wyeth stated that he wanted “to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life which most people would consider hopeless. If in some small way I have been able in paint to make the viewer sense that her world may be limited physically but by no means spiritually, then I have achieved what I set out to do.”
One very interesting part of this painting is that the head and torso are reportedly of his wife Betsy who was much younger than Anna.