Odile Crick

Artist Bio: Odile Crick (1920-2007)

Odile Crick was a well-known artist noted for her paintings of curvaceous nudes. Her models included the au pairs for her children and her famous husband’s secretaries. Her husband, Dr. Frances Crick was one of the discoverers of the helical structures of DNA, for which he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962. The illustration of the double helix structure of DNA, which illustrated Dr. Crick’s paper on DNA in Nature in 1952, was drawn at his request by his wife Odile. The drawing was later described by Dr. Sejnowski of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California as “it may be the most famous scientific drawing of the 20th century in that it defines modern biology”. A drawing of one of Odile’s models sold at Christie’s in New York for over $17,500.00 CAD several years ago.