Andrew Wyeth

Known for: Christina's World (1948); American realism in Chadds Ford

Andrew Wyeth spent his career painting the landscape and inhabitants of two places — the farm country of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and the coast of Maine near Cushing — with a meticulous tempera technique and a compositional severity that placed him outside the dominant movements of twentieth-century American painting. Christina's World (1948) — a woman dragging herself across a field toward a farmhouse — is among the most widely reproduced paintings in American history. He kept his series of 247 paintings of his neighbor Helga Testorf secret for more than a decade.