Georgia O'Keeffe

In her youth, Georgia O’Keeffe had been particularly fascinated by the jack-in-the-pulpit. In 1930, she executed a series of six paintings of the common North American herbaceous flowering plant at Lake George in New York. The National Gallery of Art is home to five of these six works: Jack-in-the-Pulpit – No. 2, Jack-in-the-Pulpit – No. 3, Jack in the Pulpit No. IV, Jack-in-the-Pulpit Abstraction – No. 5, and this work. The culminating painting in the series, Jack in the Pulpit No. VI is a highly simplified view of the plant’s spadix, which is reduced to an elegant, dark, linear configuration, whose form is echoed by an eerie white light.

The large, magnified representations of flowers that O’Keeffe embarked upon in the 1920s became her most famous subjects. Although such images had antecedents in the photographs of Paul Strand and Edward Steichen, and were to some extent paralleled in the paintings of Charles Demuth, O’Keeffe rendered them at an unprecedented scale and became more closely associated with flower imagery than her male peers.