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, this painting, Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. IV, Jack-in-the-Pulpit Abstraction – No. 5, and Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. VI. In this work, the flower is viewed from a slightly more distant vantage point than Jack-in-Pulpit - No. 2, so there is more emphasis on the elongated, upright form of the striped spathe. The green foliage is arranged in a less symmetrical manner, and the mauve background has been replaced by a cloudy sky.

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.