ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation / Thesis: “LIVING ON PAPER ...

O’Keeffe may have drawn copies of this picture and others like it, but no such copies
survive. 43
O’Keeffe at Madison Public High School and Chatham Episcopal Institute
After her year at the Sacred Heart Academy, O’Keeffe lived with her aunt in
Madison for a year, from 1902 to 1903, so that she could attend Madison Public High
School. 44
She didn’t usually enjoy her art classes there, yet she paid attention when the
teacher showed the class the details of jack-in-the-pulpit plants. This teacher might,
O’Keeffe speculated, have “started me looking at things, very carefully at details. It was
certainly the first time my attention was called to the outline and color of any growing
thing with the idea of drawing or painting it.” 45
She was engaging more and more
strongly with the great European academic tradition of drawing as a rational way of
seeing and understanding objects. O’Keeffe’s increasing intensity of graphic observation
would eventually charge with authority her mature modernist oil paintings of landscapes,
flowers, and other subjects from nature.
In 1902 the O’Keeffe family moved from their farm in Wisconsin to a house in
Williamsburg, Virginia, possibly hoping to escape the bitter mid-west winters and the
tuberculosis that had killed O’Keeffe’s father’s brothers. After she rejoined her family in
Virginia in 1903, O’Keeffe attended Chatham Episcopal Institute where the principal,
Elizabeth Mae Willis, was also the art teacher. 46
The teacher’s high ambitions for her
young students are visible in the impressive array of classical sculptural casts shown in
the school’s studio as it was illustrated in the Institute’s catalogue. 47
Miss Willis recognized O’Keeffe’s talent and gave her freedom in class to work
how and when she pleased, much to the annoyance of her jealous fellow students. 48
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