I wrote this post in June of 2024, but never published it for some reason. I put the final touches on it this morning and wanted to share it with you all.
The house made famous by Andrew Wyeth’s paintings:
My husband and I recently celebrated our wedding anniversary. As our lives are incredibly busy these days, we didn’t have a chance to plan a celebration, so we decided to just see where the day led us.
We started with breakfast at a local spot, where we ran into friends, ended up going to their home for a visit and tour, ran into other friends while touring the property, visited with them for a bit, and then at around 3:00pm Husband and I drove off without any idea what do do other than explore.
I’m generally in charge of navigating on our drives, so while we started off without any sense of direction, I realized pretty quickly that we were heading towards Thomaston, and I knew the Olson House wasn’t too far away. So we plotted our course.
The house is owned by the Farnsworth Museum and is closed for renovations. In fact, it has been closed for renovations for a few years now, but you can still walk around the outside of the home. I loved being able to see it in person even though we couldn’t go inside. We walked all around and peaked in the windows. I imagined where Christina might sit and look out the windows and what she might see. I thought about Alvaro sitting on the step by the door smoking his pipe at the end of the day, finally relenting and allowing Andrew Wyeth to paint him.
We walked through the smaller-than-I-imagined orchard and enjoyed the scent of the lilacs blooming nearby. We hadn’t realized that the field across the road from the house is private property, and it’s not marked as such (I found out when we returned home and I researched the area), so we walked down the mowed path through the field to the small cemetery where the Olson family and Andrew and Betsy Wyeth are buried. The path led us down and around toward the water front, where we enjoyed the quiet splashing of the small waves onto the shore, the fresh sea-scented air, the warm sun to make the cool breeze bearable, and the sound of the gulls overhead talking to each other.
It’s interesting to think that if Andrew Wyeth had not painted the house and Christina as he did, they both would have disappeared into obscurity. In fact, the house was only designated a National Historic Landmark in 2011 because of the paintings Wyeth did. But then, it’s also interesting that Wyeth’s most famous works never would have been created if it weren’t for his interest in the Olson House, and for Christina and Alvaro’s hospitality to him (which, rumor has it, was given without any compensation).
If you’d like to learn more about Christina Olson, I highly recommend the fictionalized book A Piece of the World by Christina Bakerkline. The Farnsworth Museum has several of Andrew Wyeth’s paintings on display. (Though I caution you not to enjoy looking at the paintings too much. We had a very uncomfortable encounter with an overzealous security guard there and will probably never return.)
I’ve been doing a deep dive into the history of the Olson family and the home. One thing that not a lot of people realize is that the house, which is now well known as an unpainted home, was actually painted white when Wyeth first saw it. Over the years, time and Maine’s weather caused the white paint to fade and flake into the bare wood we now see. The Farnsworth Museum is experimenting with different formulas of white paint to replicate the original paint as well as to protect the wood from further weathering. If you want to see the Olson house as it appears in Wyeth’s paintings, go soon. I don’t know when the museum plans to paint the house, but once it’s done the house will look much different than you may expect.
I took my oldest daughter to see the house when she was home for a visit. She was just as enchanted by the home as I had been. I thought it would be fun to do an artist study with my homeschooling teens and then take them to see the property. It’s on my summer To Do list.