O'Keeffe, who never assigned any specific symbolic meaning to her use of skeletal motifs, associated the inclusion of bones in her artwork with the raw, alive essence of the desert, and later defined Summer Days as simply a "portrayal of summertime".

The work was first exhibited at Alfred Stieglitz's New York gallery space called An American Place in 1937 and remained with O'Keeffe for numerous years, later featuring on the cover of her monographic book published in 1976 by Viking Press.

[1][2] Georgia O'Keeffe was an American modernist painter and draftswoman whose career spanned seven decades and whose work remained largely independent of major art movements.

[4] She would subsequently visit New Mexico on near annual basis from 1929 onward, often staying there several months at a time, returning to New York each winter to exhibit her work at Stieglitz's gallery.

[5] Since the mid-1930s, she began to spend increasingly more time around Santa Fe, particularly at Ghost Ranch, resulting in a new series of works, in which the artist combined and juxtaposed various landscapes motifs of the New Mexico desert and skeletal imagery.

[10] Art historian Britta Benke argues that due to "its meditative contemplation of individual objects", Summer Days is closer to a still life composition than to a landscape painting.

In particular, she points to the work of the French 18th-century painters Alexandre-François Desportes and Jean-Baptiste Oudry in which the artists combined "foreground displays of food, dead game, and dogs with background views of landscape or architecture".

[12]: 64 In her analysis of O'Keeffe's 1936 composition, Balge-Crozier also discusses the relevance of the American late 19th-century "trophy paintings" of artists like William Michael Harnett and his followers.

[12]: 65 Discussing possible 20th-century inspirations, art historian Sasha Nicholas notes that Summer Days demonstrates O'Keeffe's "awareness of the incongruous aesthetic juxtapositions" present in the work of contemporary Surrealist artists in the United States and Europe.

[6]: 195  Scholar and political scientist Timothy W. Luke argues that the artist's juxtaposition of skeletal imagery from the desert and flowers against the landscape of the Cerro Pedernal mesa or Abiquiu hills in New Mexico, evident in Summer Days and other compositions from that period, "directly tap into the mass culture's utopian vision of the West" already cultivated in numerous American literary works and movies made between the 1920s and 1950s.

[15] In 1980, curator Ellen Bradbury and architect Edward Larrabee Barnes negotiated the acquisition of Summer Days for the Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe for US$350,000.