The painting depicts Anna Christina Olson, who was paralysed from the waist down and often moved across her family property by crawling.
The artist stated that he chose this subject because he wanted “to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life which most people would consider hopeless.”
Can’t go wrong with a classic like this, the angled perspective and the individual strands of dried grass make this an utter tour de force, the realism of these elements puts the whole thing beyond the reach of most of Wyeth’s peers, if any at all.
I took a philosophy of art course once, and the prof put an image of this painting up, and polled people in the class without foreknowledge of the context of the piece to write on a piece of paper & submit what they thought the emotion being conveyed in the painting was, and he’d read a few of them. One person wrote ‘crushing defeat’, and the class chuckled. I think about that often.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oY5WNAgb90
Nice videoessay by the Nerdwriter on that painting.
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