Georgia O'Keeffe, Summer Days, 1936 

Georgia O’Keeffe’s Summer Days is a vertical oil painting on canvas. It is about 3 feet tall by 2.5 feet wide. The paint handling is smooth and even across the surface of the work. It depicts a large deer skull with antlers and a bouquet of wildflowers floating in the clouds above a mountainous desert landscape.

A nearly life-sized skull dominates the work. The head is tilted forward — so that the viewer sees its top—and is painted in creamy white and beige tones. O’Keeffe paid particular attention to anatomical detail, such as eye sockets, ridges along the snout, and a fissure that runs from above the eyes to the nasal cavity, emphasizing the form’s symmetry. The skull is centered on the work’s vertical axis and stretches from the top edge of the canvas, which is grazed by the tip of its left antler, to just below the middle of the composition.

A few inches below the hollow nasal passage of the skull, there is a loosely arranged bouquet of five flowers. A red bloom floats on the clouds beneath the skull, and two pink and two yellow flowers stretch diagonally up toward the right, with the upper petals of the topmost yellow blossom at the same height as the skull’s nose.

The skull and the flowers appear to rest weightlessly atop the clouds, which are rendered in a soft white tinged with subtle grays and fill the composition from left to right. It is only in the bottom fifth of the canvas, beneath the flowers, that blue sky starts to peek through the clouds, just above the mountains. The undulating landscape, painted in a range of earthly orange hues, stretches across the bottom of the composition from left to right. The mountains appear to be far in the distance, occupying only a few inches of the lower register of the painting.