Exhibits offer window into Wyeth’s world

So it’s hard to believe that the state Wyeth was in did not affect the affinity he immediately felt with the Olsons, an affinity that would deepen over the next 30 years, as Wyeth repeatedly drew and painted the Olsons and their saltwater farmhouse in Maine.

Wyeth turned 22 the day he met both Betsy and the Olsons. He was staying that summer at a house his father, the artist and illustrator N.C. Wyeth, had bought almost 20 years before.

On his birthday, Andrew went to visit an artist he knew who lived nearby, Merle James. When James’s daughter Betsy opened the door, Wyeth - struck by her beauty, and casting about, perhaps, for a chance to spend time with her - mentioned he had never seen the town of Cushing, which was just across the river.

That was when Betsy suggested a visit to the Olsons.

Wyeth made his first sketch of the Olson house that day, waiting by his station wagon as Betsy went up to their front door. He went on to depict the house, its inhabitants, and their surrounding land hundreds of times.

All this is recounted (and not for the first time - these events are the stuff of legend) in a catalog essay by Michael K. Komanecky, chief curator at the Farnsworth Art Museum, on the occasion of an exhibition called “Andrew Wyeth, Christina’s World and the Olson House.’’

The show, in the Farnsworth’s Wyeth Center, consists of almost 40 works of art sent to Maine by the Japanese collector Katsushige Susaki and his private museum, the Marunuma Art Park in Asaka City. It’s an intimate exhibition of (mostly) studies in watercolor and pencil, rounded out by a handful of stunning Wyeths from the Farnsworth’s own collection.

The show is complemented by a separate display, in the museum’s main building, of dozens more Wyeths from the Farnsworth’s permanent collection, some of them grouped under the title “The Road to Olson House.’’