From a New Jersey Weekend II,

1941

Though married to photographer Alfred Stieglitz in Cliffside Park in 1924 (with the painter John Marin serving as witness), Georgia O’Keeffe had few connections to New Jersey. Yet as the title of this painting attests, she created at least two works inspired by time spent in the Garden State, at the Hunterdon County farm of close friend Esther Johnson and her husband, Seward. O’Keeffe visited the Johnson’s estate in bucolic Oldwick to escape the clamor of New York: "I have been getting out in the country around New York quite often," she wrote. "I don’t think much of this kind of country but it is pleasant to get away from the city." Whereas the somber tonalities of the first <em>From a New Jersey Weekend</em>, also of 1941, with its cloudy sky and leafless trees, suggest such a diminished perception of her environs, the delicate, brightened palette of <em>From a New Jersey Weekend II </em>— cheerful even in apparent winter — seems instead to evoke the pink sandstone cliffs of the artist’s beloved Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, where O’Keeffe had been living half-time, and where she moved permanently in 1949.