THE picture shows a large, half-mown summer meadow, its grasses turned brown by the summer sun. In the foreground, a young woman in a faded pink dress lies semi-prone, her back to you. Half-propped on her hands, she gazes up the sloping meadow towards a distant, weathered, ramshackle farmhouse.
If you look hard, you can make out what looks like a shirt or something, blowing on a clothesline up at the house. That detail, plus a few loose strands of her long black hair, tell us the wind is blowing.
What gives the tableau its haunting power however – its melancholy and hint of melodrama – is not so easily puzzled out.
Chances are that countless Americans would recognise this painting from such a description alone – would know its title, even, and the artist’s name. Andrew Wyeth, who passed away in January, aged 91, was the first painter to feature on the cover of Time Magazine. His masterly realism and rural subject matter – farmhouse interiors, fields, forest, and coastal scenes – endeared him to millions of people who would have had no truck with the larger canon of 20th-century art. Chistina’s World, painted in 1948, and widely reproduced, became Wyeth’s best-known painting and a true American icon.
Andrew Wyeth was born in 1917, the youngest of five children, in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. His father, N.C. Wyeth, was himself a successful illustrator and painter, and Andrew’s own son Jamie is the third generation of Wyeths to paint, exhibit, and sell.
I certainly knew of Andrew Wyeth when I moved in the early 1980s with my family to mid-coast Maine, where we rented our own ramshackle, Wyethesque farmhouse in the tiny village of St George. But what I didn’t know, at least not until months later, is that Christina’s world was practically within sight. By that I mean the actual world of Christina Olson, Wyeth’s model for the painting, whose family farm lay just across the St George river in the village of Cushing.
I learned that much from Jim, our landlord Robert’s brother, who took us one Saturday to see the fabled farmhouse and meadow where Christina, who walked with great difficulty due to a nuero-muscular disorder, had posed for Wyeth some 25 years before. Over the next year or two I learned a bit more about Wyeth, or “Andy” as Jim and Robert casually called the painter. Andy, it turned out, summered in Cushing, yet crossed the St George river every day and drove past our farmhouse en route to his studio in the picture-postcard village of Port Clyde, at the bottom of our peninsula, where his father had converted a former sea captain’s dwelling into a family summer house back in the 1930s.
As it happened, I never even glimpsed American’s favourite painter over those four years in Maine. Nor was I, nor anybody else, aware yet of Helga Testorf, the younger, married neighbour of the Wyeths in their winter home in rural Pennsylvania, who secretly posed for Andy over a period of 15 years – clothed, nude, and sometimes sleeping – and who features in a series of nearly 250 paintings which were revealed en masse to a stunned art world in 1986.
To be sure, my eyes were elsewhere during those years, focused on the three young children Adrienne and I were rearing, trying to keep our son out of our landlord Robert’s vintage 1927 REO Flying Cloud sedan, which he stored in our barn, or endeavouring to keep our two-year old, berry-mad daughter from scoffing down the bright red fruit of the deadly nightshade that grew beneath an apple tree not far from our front porch.
Come spring and summer, I’d keep an eye also on the tomatoes and corn ripening in our outsized vegetable garden, or on the landlord’s cows which occasionally strayed from their pasture just behind our house. And, come winter, I would anxiously eye the dwindling pile of firewood from which we fed the two stoves that heated our spacious farmhouse, which by now also housed our younger daughter, who arrived just a day ahead of an early March blizzard at the end of our last burning season.
The firewood I cut each autumn in a woodlot just across the road – mostly alder, which burnt too quickly to properly heat our draughty rooms. After felling the trees and lopping off their branches with a chainsaw, I’d haul up the wood up to our barn with a tractor and a bockety wagon kindly lent us by our aforementioned friend Jim, an underpaid schoolteacher like myself, who used to describe the interior design scheme of his own cheerily cluttered farmhouse as “Early New England Poverty”.
It was Jim, too, who gave me a final gift, not long before we left Maine for Ireland again in the autumn of 1985. I can’t remember exactly what prompted it – I might well have been slagging him about the sorry shape of the wagon – but I can still see Jim in our kitchen, and still feel my own stunned amazement as he informed me that, bockety or not, its axle and undercarriage had come from the very wagon used to convey Christina Olson each day down to her meadowed world just across the St George River, and whose tracks you can see yet in the painted meadow itself.