‘What Maine was really like’

‘‘There were no curtains. Light saturated the immaculate rooms. In the kitchen was a wood-burning stove, an iron sink, gray-white walls, a basket of new peas. In lieu of electric lights, glass oil lamps were lined up, waiting for evening. ‘It looked like what Maine was really like, just as they found it,’ Wyeth remembers.’’

— Richard Meryman, on painter Andrew Wyeth’s (1917-2009) first visit to Maine, in 1939, in Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life (1996)

“Christina’s World’’ (tempera), set in Maine’s Midcoast and probably Wyeth’s most famous painting. He divided his time between his summer place in Cushing, on the Maine Coast, and Chadds Ford, in southeastern Pennsylvania. Below is the house portrayed in the painting.