Description
In Yellow Hickory Leaves with Daisy, Georgia O’Keeffe painted the vividly colored leaves and white flower at a significantly magnified scale. She was inspired by the foliage she found on her walks in the summer around Lake George in upstate New York. Although she represented the leaves with carefully realistic handling, the close focus underscores their abstract qualities. She hoped that the strangely monumental subjects would inspire viewers to, as she said, “be surprised into taking time to look” at them in a new way.
Provenance
Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986), New York and New Mexico, then Abiquiú, NM, from 1949 [on loan to the Art Institute of Chicago from 1949; letter from O’Keeffe to Daniel Catton Rich, Dec. 27, 1965; copy in curatorial object file]; given through the Alfred Stieglitz Collection to the Art Institute of Chicago, 1965.
Accession Number
24687
Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
76.5 × 101.6 cm (29 7/8 × 39 7/8 in.)
Classification
oil on canvas
Credit Line
Alfred Stieglitz Collection, gift of Georgia O'Keeffe
Background & Context
Background Story
Georgia O'Keeffe's "Yellow Hickory Leaves with Daisy" (1928) is an oil on canvas that combines the forms of hickory leaves and a daisy in a composition of extraordinary elegance. The yellow hickory leaves, perhaps in their autumn color, provide a warm, rhythmic background for the white daisy that is the focal point of the composition. O'Keeffe's treatment is characteristically close-up and enlarged, bringing the viewer into intimate contact with the forms of the leaves and the flower. The palette is warm and vibrant, with the yellows of the leaves set against the white of the daisy and perhaps a blue or dark background. The forms are simplified and abstracted, the leaves and flower reduced to their essential shapes. O'Keeffe's paintings of leaves and flowers were never merely botanical studies; they were explorations of form, color, and the relationship between the organic world and the abstract language of painting. This work, from 1928, belongs to the period when O'Keeffe was at the height of her powers, producing the flower paintings that would make her one of the most famous American artists of the 20th century.
Cultural Impact
O'Keeffe's leaf and flower paintings established a new genre of botanical abstraction, finding in the forms of nature a vocabulary of shape and color that was both specifically American and universally accessible.
Why It Matters
This painting of yellow hickory leaves and a daisy captures the delicate beauty of autumn vegetation, O'Keeffe's close-up view and simplified forms transforming a botanical study into an abstract composition of color and line.
