Jack-in-Pulpit - No. 2

In her youth, Georgia O’Keeffe had been particularly fascinated by the jack-in-the-pulpit. In 1930, she executed a series of six paintings of the common North American herbaceous flowering plant at Lake George in New York. The National Gallery of Art is home to five of these six works: this one, _Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. 3, Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. IV, Jack-in-Pulpit Abstraction - No. 5,_ and _Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. VI_. In this particular work, the plant is set against a pale mauve background, and all four corners of the composition are occupied by green foliage.

The large, magnified representations of flowers that O’Keeffe embarked upon in the 1920s became her most famous subjects. Although such images had antecedents in the photographs of Paul Strand (American, 1890 - 1976) and Edward Steichen (American, 1879 - 1973) and were to some extent paralleled in the paintings of Charles Demuth (American, 1883 - 1935), O’Keeffe rendered them at an unprecedented scale. She ultimately became more closely associated with flower imagery than her male peers.