For years, access to the vast field across the street from the Olson House in Cushing was handled in the same way as many privately owned but undeveloped areas across Maine long have been: It wasn’t that you couldn’t walk out there and see the same view that Andrew Wyeth painted in 1948 of Christina Olson looking back up the hill toward the home she lived in with her brother. No one was going to arrest you for trespassing or anything if you wandered off the road to take a look, but it wasn’t explicitly allowed either. Paths were mowed, including one that allowed public access to the cemetery at the foot of the fields, overlooking Maple Juice Cove, where both Christina and Alvaro Olson and Andrew and Betsy Wyeth are buried. The management, as it were, was a bit ad hoc, however. During some summers, no one in the community was quite sure who was supposed to do the mowing.
This year, as the grass grows taller there will be a much surer plan for keeping paths mowed — and for adding new signage and more, too. Because for the first time ever (or at the very least since “Christina’s World” was painted in 1948), the Olson Field is now open to the public.
In the years since Betsy Wyeth’s death in 2020, the family’s nonprofit, the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, has been unraveling her estate, with many of the Wyeths’ Maine properties being donated or sold to organizations that can both maintain them as art historical sites and allow varying degrees of public access, too. “We are not a land steward, to put it simply,” said Laura West, executive director of the foundation. In 2022, Allen and Benner Islands, where the Wyeths’ final summer home was located, were acquired by Colby College for long-term stewardship. And in March, the 16-acre Olson Field property, which was also owned by the Wyeths, was donated by the foundation to the Georges River Land Trust.
“It wasn’t like the family was turning people away from visiting the field,” said Maeve Cosgrove, community engagement manager at Georges River Land Trust. “The turning point is now that we can now invite the community in.”
It was Betsy who first showed Andrew the Olson House, which she once described as “looming up like a weathered ship stranded on a hilltop,” and it had been part of her summers in Cushing since she was 10 years old. In 1939, 22-year-old Andrew came to Cushing to visit her family’s summer home in order to meet Betsy and her two sisters. She was the youngest, only 17, but as the story goes, Andrew and Betsy hit it off, and she took him to meet siblings Christina and Alvaro Olson at the house (though maybe only to see how he’d respond to the rough lives they lived, particularly Christina, who was paralyzed from the waist down but refused to use a wheelchair). Whatever the reason, that day changed the Wyeths’ lives forever: Betsy and Andrew were married the following year, and Andrew would spend the next three decades painting in and around the Olson House when the couple came to the Midcoast from Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, in the summers, making nearly 300 works there.
“I just couldn’t stay away from there,” Andrew once said of the Olson property. “I did other pictures while I knew them but I’d always seem to gravitate back to the house … It was Maine.”
By far the most famous piece Andrew made at the Olson House is “Christina’s World,” which is not only the most recognizable painting in his vast body of work, but one of the most recognizable images in all of American art. But the vast scope of the Olson House paintings and drawings, and the unique relationship with Christina and Alvaro that the Wyeths developed over the years show how the Olson property represented far more than the backdrop of one major work.
“It was part of her — part of what she loved, part of what she did when she came back to Maine in the summer,” Amy Morey said of Betsy’s relationship with the field and the home. Morey started working for the Wyeths as the manager of their Maine collection of art over 20 years ago, and continues that work today as the collections manager at the Andrew & Betsy Wyeth Study Center at the Farnsworth Art Museum. “She loved to walk, and the fields were part of that when she was in Cushing. She spent a lot of time walking in the fields, birding, blueberrying in the summertime.”
Morey would sometimes drive down to Cushing with Betsy so that they could walk the field together, but Betsy never fully articulated to Morey what the Olson property meant to her, even after Andrew’s death. “I think when you live with something it’s sort of automatic that you know — you don’t have to say it, you don’t have to explain it,” Morey said of her longtime boss and friend’s relationship to the field. “It’s just part of what you experience when you visit there, and you don’t have to put words to it.”
The land trust is working closely with the Farnsworth, which acquired the Olson House itself in 1992, to establish the new preserve. Visitors to the field can use the parking lot behind the house, which is still undergoing a long-running renovation and is closed to the public. The trails will be maintained in part thanks to a $10,000 endowment for mowing made by the Wyeth Foundation, and will open up access to the shoreline at the site, including a small island that’s accessible by foot at low tide. Interpretive signage will address not only the cultural significance of the field, but its ecology, too — it’s a prime birding spot, both for grassland species and wading birds down along the shore. One thing you won’t find, however, is any kind of sign that says “ANDREW WYETH STOOD HERE.”
“That’s not our business to say that sort of thing because it would be misleading — it’s not the way the painting was crafted,” said Chris Brownawell, the director of the Farnsworth. Andrew Wyeth first came up with the idea for the piece not when he was looking up at the house from the vantage point of the painting, but when he was looking out over the field from the attic room he used as a studio during the summertime, and saw Christina dragging herself across the grass. The image is very much a reflection of place, but very much a fiction, too. Still, Brownawell realizes that people are going to go down and try to find the view that looks like Andrew’s nonetheless, so that they can take a picture of themselves. “But that’s fine,” he said, “that brings the story of Wyeth — the story of the Olsons, the story of the house, the story of the field — to life. And we’re delighted that the public will have access to really become part of that iconic work in American art.”
Standing in the field, it becomes apparent pretty quickly that the view of the painting doesn’t really exist — you can’t be looking straight-on at the gable of the barn and still see the house from that exact three-quarter angle. Never mind the road, which Andrew probably left out, and the pines, which have probably grown up since 1948. Still, there are times when you can learn so much from seeing the environment that an artist existed within. Like Claude Monet’s Giverny or Georgia O’Keefe’s home in Abiquiú, the Olson House puts Andrew Wyeth into context. And looking up at the house from the field, it’s abundantly clear that he wasn’t some overwrought gothic as some of his critics have made him out to be over the years — he was mostly painting what was there in front of him, mostly as he saw it.
“I think it’s tremendous that it brings that particular painting back to the foreground,” Morey said of people being able to go out into the field now. “You can see where it’s placed — you can see the sky, you can hear the wind. It comes alive for you.”
This story appears through a media partnership with Midcoast Villager.