page_title: Early works of Georgia O'Keeffe
section_title: Childhood education
hierarchical_section_title: Early works of Georgia O'Keeffe / Childhood education
caption_attribution_description: English: Georgia O'Keefe, Untitled (Seated Figure), 1901-1902, graphite on paper
context_page_description: 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.
context_section_description: By age ten she had decided to become an artist. Her grandmothers, Isabella Totto and Catherine O'Keeffe, painted still lifes and flowers. Her sisters, Catherine and Ida, made and sold their paintings and Anita, another sister, also painted. When she was eleven, art lessons were arranged for her and her younger sisters, Ida and Anita, at their home.
  She and her sister received art instruction from local watercolorist Sara Mann, who taught her to copy images from Text Books for Art Education by Louis Prang. The books showed how to create simple shapes and up to complex compositions. Although she appreciated learning how to create two-dimensional images of nature, she knew at that time that she did not want to be an artist that created traditional works of art or and had little interest in painting portraits.
  O'Keeffe attended high school at Sacred Heart Academy in Madison, Wisconsin as a boarder between 1901 and 1902, and her parents provided extra tuition for art classes—using crayon, charcoal or oil paints—that were taught by a nun with high expectations, Sister Angelique. 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. She was proud of a watercolor that she created of a lighthouse on moonlit night. The foreground depicts a green grass, trees, and a path leading to the lighthouse. A sailboat is at sea under a moon and a cloudy sky. Although it was an early work, it conveyed a romantic mood and was a complex composition.
  She joined her family in Virginia in 1903 and completed high school as a boarder at Chatham Episcopal Institute in Virginia (now Chatham Hall) and graduated in 1905. Elizabeth May Willis, who studied at Art Students League of New York, was her art teacher and the principle of the school. Willis gave O'Keeffe special privileges, including being able to use the art school room after school hours. While at Chatham, sometime between 1903 and 1905, she made a watercolor painting of a vase of red flowers with green leaves as a study. The watercolor paintings that she was liked the most from that period include one of ears of yellow and red corn, with the school kept as an example of a student's best work, and another of a bunch of lilacs. O'Keeffe, the art director of the school's 1905 yearbook, illustrated the book with her cartoons, drawings, and illustrations. They reflect an interest in Art Nouveau, pointillism, symbolism, and the works of Charles Dana Gibson. Willis urged the O'Keeffes to send their daughter to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
caption: Georgia O'Keefe, Untitled (Seated Figure), 1901-1902, graphite on paper
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