From a distance, Andrew Wyeth’s 1948 painting looks like a young girl daydreaming in a summer field. In reality the figure is Anna Christina Olson, a 55-year-old woman with a severe degenerative muscular disorder, dragging herself across her family’s farm in Cushing, Maine. This episode tells her story. Born in 1893, she lived her entire life on that property, and by her late twenties could no longer stand or walk unassisted. She refused a wheelchair and chose instead to crawl, pulling herself through floorboards, mud, and grass on her own terms.

We look at Wyeth’s nearly 30-year relationship with the Olson family, the moment he saw Anna from an upstairs window making her way up the incline toward the house, and the choices he made in the studio: egg tempera on a gessoed panel built up in tiny overlapping strokes, a torso modeled by his wife Betsy, who also named the painting, and a landscape stretched so the house and barn sit far apart to convey the scale of her daily journey. Then we cover the painting’s quiet debut at the Macbeth Gallery, its purchase for 1,800 dollars by MoMA’s Alfred Barr while New York was consumed by abstract expressionism, and its rise into a cultural icon that the museum rarely lets travel.

• What polio or Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease would have meant on a coastal Maine farm with no accessibility infrastructure
• Why refusing the wheelchair can be read as a reclamation of autonomy rather than stubbornness
• The ethics of Wyeth’s gaze, and his stated aim to honor her ability to manage a life outsiders would call hopeless
• How the Olson House, now run by the Farnsworth Art Museum, was restored to match the painting rather than history
• Wyeth’s 2009 burial in the Olson family graveyard beside Anna and her brother Alvaro