Her frustration with the doll wound up inspiring one of her first drawings—a stiff-legged man bent over from the hip. Since that appeared absurd, she turned the drawing on its side so the man appeared to be lying down with his feet in the air. This humble effort awakened an inchoate yearning. “It gave me a feeling of real achievement to have made something—even if it wasn’t what I had intended,” Georgia said. “I kept the little drawing for a long time.”17 Decades later, Georgia wondered why she drew a picture of a man when she couldn’t remember ever trying to draw a woman, or even one of the girl dolls. In a household of women, she had wanted to generate a strong male presence.
At the end of the day, the family ate in the dining room while the hired help ate in the kitchen and on Sundays, without staff, the girls cooked and served. Meals were largely silent. According to the Victorian standards of deportment, children were to be seen, not heard. Afterward, the children went to the parlor to hear Ida play the piano and sing. Georgia learned to read music and played piano and violin. Though passionate, she never became as proficient as her mother. Later, Ida read aloud from history books and novels, times that remained among Georgia’s fondest memories. “She told wonderful stories,” she remembered. “She read to us on rainy days and weekends. My older brother had bad eyes, and she’d read to him, and I always listened, even after I could read myself. I think that reading was a good start to a lot of things.”18
Adventure tales like The Last of the Mohicans and The Adventures of Kit Carson fueled the young girl’s wonder about the Wild West. The parlor floor was covered with the skin of a buffalo her father had shot in the Dakotas, and Georgia identified with his yearning for the freedoms of undiscovered country. “I think that deep down I am like my father,” she later said. “When he wanted to see the country, he just got up and went.”19 Ida, however, considered books the basis of higher learning. She insisted all her children receive an education despite her husband’s protests about needing his sons on the farm.
Georgia’s maternal and paternal grandmothers were divided along social and cultural lines but shared an affinity for visual art. Isabella Totto and Catherine O’Keeffe both were talented painters of flowers and still lifes, and their canvases still come on the market from time to time. Although Ida was more concerned with music than painting, she encouraged each of her children’s inherent talents. She was not going to let their remote upbringing undermine her standards of learning and culture.
Of the seven children, only Alexius, the youngest boy, and Claudia, the youngest girl, did not demonstrate strong artistic inclinations. Young Ida, Catherine, and Anita all painted, and the first two exhibited and sold their work. Francis became an architect. Georgia, of course, achieved the greatest success as an artist.
Georgia claimed that her visual memory was established before she could walk; she could recall the details on her baby quilt and the “brightness of the light.” She remembered in detail a dress worn by her mother’s friend, and the pansies painted on her bureau. Her auspicious affinity for the appearance of things did not translate immediately to art. Although she began drawing at an early age, she was not exactly a natural. She herself considered that first drawing of the bending man to be a failure.
It was not until Georgia was eleven that she began to take drawing lessons at home with her two younger sisters, Ida and Anita. Their grammar school teacher’s sister Belle was considered by the community to be “a natural artist.” “The school was small and cold, and on bad winter days I would have maybe seven or eight scholars. For busy work,” Mrs. Zed Edison recalled, “Belle would take a sprig from a tree, a leaf, or if fortunate, a blossom, and arrange it for the pupils to draw and enlarge. I have often wondered if that was Georgia’s start in the artist line.”20 Since flowers were among the first things that Georgia painted, they probably seemed a welcome subject throughout her life.
“I don’t know where I got my artist idea,” Georgia mused. “I only know that . . . it was definitely settled in my mind.”21
Certainly, the artist idea was reinforced by regular art lessons. As Georgia’s and her sisters’ skills improved, they were driven once a month to the Sun Prairie home of Sarah Mann, who taught them to copy from the Prang series Text Books of Art Education.
During the nineteenth century, Louis Prang was the highest-quality printer of chromolithographs, celebrated for his vibrantly colored and complexly designed Christmas and Valentine’s Day cards. His reproductions of history and landscape paintings were considered works of art unto themselves, framed and hung in parlors, and he published Modern Art Quarterly from 1893 to 1897. Today, he is best remembered for the tin boxes of watercolors bearing the Prang label, the first in the United States to be rich and varied in color as well as nontoxic, so they could be used by children. The Prang art instruction manuals were illustrated with chromolithographs of paintings and detailed diagrams describing how to execute everything from a simple three-dimensional cube to a bucolic genre scene of farm workers.22
Prang instruction manuals introduced Georgia to the world of illusion, and she spent hours leafing through the still lifes and landscapes. These “chromos,” as they were called, provided Georgia with her first impressions of how nature could be reproduced in two dimensions. From them, she copied a spray of oats, a sepia version of a pharaoh’s horses, and some overblown red roses, all of which were framed lavishly by Ida in a Victorian style that Georgia later labeled “pretentious.”
Despite Georgia’s latter-day reservations, the fact that her mother framed these early drawings marks a clear signal of approval and encouragement. Ida was not overtly affectionate but she urged her daughters in a loving way to enjoy the world of art and culture.
Most of Georgia’s early works are lost, including those in the pretentious frames. Earliest among the survivors is a 1901 pencil drawing of a woman in a headscarf and long skirt and a man in work clothes and cap. Portrayed from the back, they hang clothes on a line that is suspended from a tree trunk and into empty space. It is the clumsy effort of a young girl and proves as much as anything that Georgia was not a prodigy. She had to work to improve her technical abilities.
Shortly after turning twelve, Georgia decided her future career. She asked Lena, the daughter of their family laundress, about her plans. The girl had no plans but politely asked Georgia the same question. “I’m going to be an artist,” she declared. Having made her stand, she found herself confronted by family members asking for confusing details. Would she be an illustrator or portraitist? Despite her assiduous copying from the Prang books, she later claimed that she “never associated my idea of being an artist with illustrations in books that we had.”23 Undoubtedly, this is a view that was simplified over time and influenced by her penchant for self-invention.
In addition, she insisted that the expressions rendered in the oil portraits of her Dutch great-grandmother and great-grandfather had less appeal for her than their lace cuffs and collars. Her parents warned that such strong opinions could make it difficult for her to earn her living as an artist, but the youthful Georgia insisted that she would only paint portraits of people she liked or thought beautiful. As it turned out, her entire output of thousands of pictures included only a small handful of portraits, mostly of family members, so this early prediction proved true. Whether or not it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, it seems that she was driven to perform but that, from an early stage, she understood her limitations.
II
“I was taken to boarding school,” Georgia said.1 Few of her remarks retain such a sense of powerlessness. In 1901, the fourteen-year-old Georgia was forced to abandon her idyllic childhood on the farm. Despite being raised with only a holiday familiarity with the Catholic Church, she was sent to Scared Heart Academy, run by the Dominican Sisters of Sinsinawa. It had been constructed in 1895 on some fifty acres along Lake Wingra, on the outskirts of Madison. The gothic edifice, styled after a brick cathedral, had a large rose window mounted over its arched doorway.
About sixty girls were there during Georgia’s stay and, compared to the Town Hall School, it had a rigorous regimen. According to a brochure from Georgia’s term, visitors were allowed only on Saturday afternoons; pupils were required to write home once a week under supervision of the sisters “to prevent undesirable correspondence” and were discouraged from traveling home for holidays. Georgia was required to come to the school with a supply of specified undergarments, bedding, silverware, and “one veil of black silk Brussels net, one yard square, edged with lace one inch wide.” Children of any denomination could attend Sacred Heart, but all pupils had to bring a black dress “UNMIXED with WHITE or ANY COLOR,” as the brochure emphasized, for Sundays. This was the beginning of Georgia’s unwavering delight in wearing long black dresses.
Far from rebelling, as one might anticipate from her undisciplined childhood, Georgia adored Sacred Heart. She recalled, “At the convent in Madison, I don’t even remember wanting to do anything I shouldn’t.”2
Georgia had accompanied her father to Sun Prairie’s Sacred Heart Catholic Church on religious holidays, but the convent school introduced her to the spiritual training of solitude, serenity, and simplicity. These qualities were in short supply in the O’Keeffe farmhouse, filled as it was with children, workers, and extended family. As an adult, she would recall this cool, monastic ambience as she built her uncluttered home in New Mexico.
Her schedule included courses in algebra, ancient history, English, physical geography, and geology. Her parents paid the eighty-dollar tuition, plus an extra twenty for lessons in painting, “in oil, on china, tapestry, in crayon.”3 Although lessons in watercolor were available for an additional twenty dollars, as well as classes in music, Georgia’s family could afford only one such luxury. Art instruction was a highly regarded aspect of the curriculum, however, with nine courses available. The brochure noted that the studio was “well-furnished” and “so situated as to command a view of almost every variety of landscape, which students may sketch from the windows.”4
Sister Angelique taught the art classes, and despite her lovely white hands and calm dark eyes, Georgia found her to be “a bit hot and stuffy.” She said, “I felt like shrinking away from her.”5 The first day of school, the nun placed a white plaster cast of a baby’s hand on a table, handed Georgia some charcoal, and told her to draw. The budding artist labored intently, but the nun pronounced her effort too small and the lines too black. Georgia barely held back her tears. Inwardly, she vowed never again to be caught unprepared. “I said to myself that I would never have that happen again,” she recalled. “I would never, never draw anything too small.”6 Although she usually destroyed unacceptable work, she kept that crude drawing as a stinging reminder.
The childlike tone of her recollection, written in her autobiography seventy-five years after the fact, indicates that she wasn’t accustomed to criticism. Although her mother was stern and aloof, she had little time to offer her children instruction or criticism. Auntie and the schoolteachers served as caretakers, not authority figures.
Sister Angelique’s high standards inspired Georgia to concentrate and perform. By June, her large, pale drawings of casts were put on display in the classroom. The nun had scrawled “G. O’Keeffe” on each one in a much darker tone of pencil. “I was shocked to see my name so big and black on my pale drawings,” Georgia said. “And it didn’t seem like my name—it was someone quite apart from me. I had never thought much about having a last name.”7 In time, her last name would be become synonymous with her art, but this was the beginning of her recognition of artistic identity, the process of individuating and conceiving of self as special. In seeing her name lettered onto her drawings, she saw that her art represented her own, unique methods of representation and, eventually, her own ideas.
Although Georgia had disliked classes and been an average pupil at the Town Hall School, in the more demanding institution she was placed in the advanced section, earning a gold medal for deportment, first prize for ancient history, and a gold pin for “improvement in illustrating and drawing.” At year’s end, she returned to Sun Prairie and proudly showed her awards to her mother, who responded coolly, “I’d be surprised if you had not won it.”
Georgia longed to return to Sacred Heart Academy in the fall, but the O’Keeffes did not have the resources to send all of their children to private schools at the same time. With their restricted budget, Frank and Ida decided that some schooling was better than none, so their children were rotated through the pricey institutions. At Ida’s insistence, the children enjoyed an equitable distribution of education regardless of gender.
Sacred Heart offered a 10 percent discount on tuition for two children from the same family. Therefore, the following year, the younger girls, Ida and Anita, were sent to board at the convent while Georgia and her brother Francis were packed off to Madison to live with Aunt Lola in her house at 1604 Regent Street. The childless Lenore Totto, a schoolteacher, was happy to have the two teenagers for company.
Madison, with a population of about twenty thousand, was a seat of sophistication compared to Sun Prairie. Called the “four lake city,” it was surrounded by sweeping shorelines, the largest being that of Lake Mendota, where Georgia and Francis went swimming. There were spacious parks with playgrounds, a bustling downtown shopping area, the sprawling University of Wisconsin, and trolley cars.
In this miniature metropolis, Georgia and Francis were enrolled at the sophomore and junior level, respectively, at Madison High School in the fall of 1902. Disappointed by the ordinary quality of the public school system, Georgia was especially dismissive of the art teacher, a woman who wore an annoying hat topped with artificial violets. However reluctantly, the young artist learned from her how to examine plants in order to better draw and paint them. The first example was a jack-in-the-pulpit. Holding it by the stem, the teacher pointed out the deep green and purple coloration, pulling back its hood to reveal the stamen. This was the first time that the artist had looked closely at a flower, instead of an illustration, with the goal of making a painting. One of Georgia’s surviving paintings from this period is a pretty watercolor of a branch of tiny, pale cherry blossoms.
Georgia was proud of two pictures painted that year. As though yearning for escape, she painted a watercolor of a lighthouse on a moonlit beach lined with palm trees, composed with the aid of a geography book, as she had not yet been out of untropical Wisconsin. Awkward, it is nevertheless a complex composition with a rather romantic mood. It reflected her imagination put to good use during the long winter.
The other painting depicts the view from her bedroom window of two trees, a spruce and a leafless oak painted in blue and black watercolor, with much of the paper left blank to convey moonlight on the snowy fields. She was especially pleased with her discovery that the white of the fallen snow must be conveyed by shadows of blue and violet. In both pictures, she had a clear sense of how the paintings should look. Georgia reflected that these two works in particular were “the only really creative efforts of this period.”8
With four children at boarding school, Frank, forty-nine, and Ida, thirty-eight, prepared to embrace an unpredictable future and a move to a warmer climate.
Five years earlier, Frank’s mother had died of cancer. A year after that loss, his youngest brother, Bernard, contracted tuberculosis and was nursed in Frank and Ida’s home for a year before he died. By the age of ten, Georgia had been to three funerals. All of the O’Keeffes were buried in the Sacred Heart Catholic cemetery in Sun Prairie.
Since none of his brothers had married, all of the O’Keeffe property was left to Frank. Combined with the Totto acreage purchased from his mother-in-law, he owned an impressive six hundred and forty acres, about four times more than the average farm in Dane County, Wisconsin.
This inheritance did nothing to mitigate his sadness. Despite a sanguine disposition, Frank was exhausted by the struggle against disease, aggravated by brutal winters with snow up to twenty
feet deep blocking rail travel and mail, which left families stranded without sufficient fuel or food. The winter after Bernard’s death, the temperature dropped to thirty-four degrees below zero. Frank felt as though he was waiting for tuberculosis to take him, or other members of his family.
He was worried, too, about legal difficulties with his neighbors. Sun Prairie records show that he was accused of horse theft, and there were rumors of womanizing and heavy drinking. He, in turn, accused a neighbor of attempting to farm on his land.
To this day, Sun Prairie residents, who only know the O’Keeffes by reputation, slight Frank for having had an abundance of property but being only “an average farmer” and his wife for being “uppity.”9 Frank wanted to escape from the town that had brought him so much misery. He seized upon the idea of moving to the South. Promotional brochures of the era touted Williamsburg as the “garden spot” of Virginia. A land promoter in Madison, Chandler Chapman, peddled a brochure on the area promising that “Pneumonia and inflammatory diseases are very rare . . . and the absence of tubercular consumption . . . is well authenticated.”10
Frank had yearned for adventure since his youthful sojourn in the Dakotas. Ida had been raised in Sun Prairie, but she longed for a more genteel life in a pleasant climate.
The extensive land that their grandparents had settled had increased in value by 100 percent; Frank and Ida sold it for one hundred dollars an acre. However, the sale netted only $12,500.11 It seems that Frank had considerable debts to pay, having borrowed funds in the 1890s to keep the farm afloat. Still, the O’Keeffes wound up with the equivalent of about $100,000 by today’s standards.
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