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and friends. (When she was fourteen and studying art at Sacred Heart Academy near Madison, Wisconsin, one of the nuns criticized O’Keeffe’s drawing of two hands for being “too small.” O’Keeffe later said that this motivated her never to draw anything too small again.) ART STUDENT When her family moved to Virginia in 1903 to escape the harsh Wisconsin winters, O’Keeffe stud- ied art at the Chatham Episcopal Institute. Sixteen- year-old girls in this part of the country dressed like old-fashioned southern belles in corsets and petti- coats, with their long hair styled and curled in ring- lets. O’Keeffe was different. She usually pulled her hair back in a simple ponytail and wore suit coats or plain white dresses. Two years later, when she was eighteen, O’Keeffe went to stay with her aunts in Chicago so she could attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. There, she took top honors in the life drawing classes of John Vanderpoel, who was, according to O’Keeffe, one of the few “real” teachers she had known. O’Keeffe, though, had mixed feelings about the institute. When she was comfortable drawing the nude male models, she was instructed to copy Old Master paintings in painstaking detail. According to the institute’s Circular of Instruction , the school fos- tered “the highest efficiency [in] the severe practice of academic drawing and painting.” Competition for the front seats in the drawing classes was fierce, but by the end of the first term, O’Keeffe had risen to the top quarter of the class. Then, in 1907, O’Keeffe enrolled in the Art Stu- dents League in New York City. There she earned a scholarship under the tutelage of William Merritt Chase for her painting Rabbit and Copper Pot . A copy of this painting survived her later self-evalu- ation only because it was retained for exhibition by the Art Students League.

The scholarship from the Art Students League allowed her to spend the summer at Lake George, where she was able to paint outdoors for the first time. However, financial difficulties soon forced O’Keeffe to leave her art studies, and she returned to Chicago to work as a commercial artist. There she designed the logo for Little Dutch Girl cleaner, which

Rabbit and Copper Pot (Still Life with Hare) 1907, oil on canvas; 19 x 23 1/2 in. (48 x 60 cm). The Art Students League of New York, New York. This work is one of the rare extant paintings made while O’Keeffe was studying with William Merritt Chase at the Art Students League in New York. In 1923 O’Keeffe wrote of that time, “I loved the color in the brass and copper pots and pans, peppers, onions and other things we painted for him.”

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