The Helga Pictures

The Helga Pictures are a series of more than 240 paintings and drawings of German model Helga Testorf (born c. 1933 or c. 1939) created by Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009) between 1971 and 1985.

Helga Testorf was a neighbor of Wyeth's in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and over the course of fifteen years posed for Wyeth indoors and out of doors, nude and clothed, in attitudes that reminded writers of figures painted by Botticelli and Édouard Manet. To John Updike, her body "is what Winslow Homer's maidens would have looked like beneath their calico."

Born in Germany, Helga entered a Prussian Protestant convent chosen by her father in 1955. After becoming seriously ill she left the convent and lived in Mannheim, where she studied to be a nurse and a masseuse. In 1957, she met John Testorf, a German-born, naturalized American citizen, whom she married in 1958. By 1961 they were living in Philadelphia, where she worked in a tannery, but they soon moved to Chadds Ford. There she raised a family that would grow to include four children, and acted as caretaker to farmer Karl Kuerner, an elderly neighbor who was a friend and model for Wyeth.

Wyeth asked Testorf to model for him in 1971, and from then until 1985 he made 45 paintings and 200 drawings of her, many of which depicted her nude. The sessions were a secret even to their spouses. The paintings were stored at the home of his student, neighbor and good friend, Frolic Weymouth.

Explaining the series, Wyeth said, "The difference between me and a lot of painters is that I have to have a personal contact with my models. ... I have to become enamored. Smitten. That's what happened when I saw Helga." He described his attraction to "all her German qualities, her strong, determined stride, that Loden coat, the braided blond hair". Art historian John Wilmerding wrote, "Such close attention by a painter to one model over so long a period of time is a remarkable, if not singular, circumstance in the history of American art". For art critic James Gardner, Testorf "has the curious distinction of being the last person to be made famous by a painting".

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