The following quotation is from Richard Merryman’s article, “Andrew Wyeth: An Interview,” published in Life, May 14, 1965.

“When I painted it in 1948, Christina’s World hung all summer in my house in Maine and nobody particularly reacted to it. I thought, ‘Boy, is this one ever a flat tire.’ Now I get a letter a week from all over the world, usually wanting to know what she’s doing. Actually, there isn’t definite story. The way this tempera happened, I was in an upstairs room in the Olson house and saw Cristina crawling in the field. Later, I went down on the road and made a pencil drawing of the house, but I never went down into the field. You see, my memory was more of a reality than the thing itself. I didn’t put Christina in till the very end. I worked on the hill for months, that brown grass, and kept thinking about her in her pink dress like a faded lobster shell I might find on the beach, crumpled. Finally I got up enough courage to say to her, ‘Would you mind if I made a drawing of you sitting outside?’ and drew her crippled arms and hands. Finally, I was so shy about posing her, I got my wife Betsy to pose for her figure. Then it came time to lay in Christina’s figure against that planet I’d created for her all those weeks. I put this pink tone on her shoulder–and it almost blew me across the room.”~Andrew Wyeth

The above quotation and photograph of “Christina’s World” are posted here for viewer’s art information only.