Early works of Georgia O'Keeffe

The early works of American artist Georgia O'Keeffe are those made before she was introduced to the principles of Arthur Wesley Dow in 1912.

[5] When her family moved to Williamsburg, Virginia in late 1902, O'Keeffe and her brother, Francis, stayed in Wisconsin with her aunt, Lenore Totto, who was a school teacher.

Her art studies at the high school allowed her to further develop her skills in making images of flowers, like a surviving watercolor of tiny cherry blossoms.

[11] The watercolor paintings that she liked the most from that period include one of ears of yellow and red corn, which the school kept as an example of a student's best work, and another of a bunch of lilacs.

For financial reasons, O'Keeffe lived on Indiana Avenue with Ollie and Charles Totto, siblings of her mother.

[13] In 1907, she attended the Art Students League in New York City, where she studied under William Merritt Chase, Kenyon Cox and F. Luis Mora.

[9] She won the League's William Merritt Chase still-life prize for her oil painting Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot in 1908.

[1] She took a job in Chicago as a commercial artist and worked there until 1910, when she returned to Virginia to recuperate from a case of the measles[14] and later moved with her family to Charlottesville.