In the fall of 1902, they sold most of their possessions in the belief that they would start afresh in Williamsburg. Frank and Ida went ahead by train, followed by Aunt Jennie, her horse, and the younger children, Catherine, Alexius, and Claudia. The older children, Francis, Georgia, Ida, and Anita, finished their terms at school and arrived in Williamsburg in June 1903.
Moving from the familiar, open fields of Sun Prairie to a house near town, from the flat, no-nonsense manner of the Midwest to the elaborate etiquette of the South, was a wrenching transition for the O’Keeffe children. Yet their parents did not discuss the decision with them. Even allowing for the fact that communication among family members was far less open than today, such unpredictable behavior took its toll. Over the years, Georgia in particular adopted her parents’ habit of keeping secrets and rarely discussed her troubles or triumphs with friends or family. The O’Keeffes observed such a painful code of silence that Claudia, the youngest, once despaired, “Why does this family always keep everything a secret?”12
Williamsburg prided itself on its distinguished past. Between 1699 and 1780, it had been the capital of Virginia, then England’s largest and wealthiest American colony. After independence, the capital was moved to its present location, Richmond. One hundred and twenty-five years later, the O’Keeffes arrived to find that Williamsburg still was mourning the loss of the Civil War and holding tight to the tattered flag of Southern custom and culture. After the Confederate Army’s retreat, Yankees had occupied Williamsburg until the end of the war.13 A citizenry impoverished by these embattled years remained wary of strangers, especially anyone not from the South.
Situated on a lush peninsula between the James and York Rivers, Williamsburg had retained its antebellum homes and civic buildings, but they were shabby from neglect. There was almost no telephone service, indoor plumbing, or electricity. There were two banks and one automobile, a rare sign of the modern age. Stray chickens and cows frequented Duke of Gloucester Street, the unpaved central thoroughfare. One resident defended it, saying, “There was some dignity, even in the decay.”14 It was a sleepy, forgotten town with, ironically, less potential for development than Sun Prairie.
The O’Keeffes, familiar only with the mutually supportive relationships formed in farming communities, could not fathom the inbred habits of the populace. Williamsburg families had known each other for generations. Promotional literature notwithstanding, newcomers were not warmly welcomed. Frank O’Keeffe was quickly targeted as undignified and having the peculiar habit of fraternizing with his black help. Hoping to gain local respect, Ida urged her husband to buy a grand white clapboard house called Wheatland on nine acres of fashionable Peacock Hill.
Given their resources, the price was high, about $3,500, or one-quarter of their working capital. Still, the house was the finest they had ever owned, graced with ornamental front porches on the ground floor and second story and a stable for their horse, Penelope. The children would ride “Penny-lope,” as they called her, to the center of town and the horse would find its way back.
A winding driveway lined with pine trees led to the front door, but inside there was very little furniture. They had brought only a few O’Keeffe and Totto heirlooms, such as Irish silver and the Hungarian gold and emerald earrings. They believed that Frank’s new business venture—a grocery and feed store—would prosper and they would soon be purchasing furnishings to match the style of their house.
Ida enrolled all of the children except Georgia as day students at private schools. Francis went to the College of William and Mary, which, since the Civil War, had suffered from fire, bankruptcy, and a loss of accreditation. During his four years there, five professors in a single building taught all the courses. (The state took over the college in 1906 and restored it to its present respectable state.) Alexius attended the Academy of the College, while Ida and Anita went to Stuart Hall. Georgia was sent two hundred miles north to Chatham Episcopal Institute.
The town of Chatham dates to 1777, when the courthouse was moved to its present site, which was then called Cherrystone Meeting House Springs. Those springs still bubble in a low ravine.15 Chatham Episcopal Institute was set on a woodsy three hundred and fifty acres in the hills outside of the town. Conditions were spartan in the large white frame house on a hill. Wood floors were unpainted and a small wood stove heated each room. Communal baths were taken weekly in the school’s three bathtubs. The school was governed by rules and regulations familiar to Georgia from her days at Sacred Heart. At the age of sixteen, however, she resisted such restrictions. What had seemed a welcome sense of order just two years before now represented control and confinement. She refused to read her French lessons aloud to herself three times a day and spent much time wondering, “What can I do that I shouldn’t do and not get caught?”16
While adolescence tends to provoke rebellion, Georgia had the added strain of being traumatized by her sudden, unexplained relocation. In her autobiography, she wrote, “My memories of childhood are quite pleasant.” By contrast, her teen years were turning out to be completely unpredictable. Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, her parents had sent her away to three different schools in three different cities. Significantly, her autobiography makes no mention of the circumstances surrounding the family move to Virginia.
The school program was loaded with recitals, all-girl dances, and an Easter picnic. Once a week the girls were escorted into town by a chaperone, walking two by two on the wooden plank sidewalks. Georgia, as usual, took solace in nature. Every day, she joined her classmates on afternoon walks led by a teacher, but it was not enough. The misty Blue Ridge Mountains beckoned from the distance, so she began sneaking out with her friends for illicit hikes. She called them “the best things that happened for me in those years—because I never did like school.”17
Given her high marks at Sacred Heart, Georgia’s remark about the school reflects her emotional distress. She was isolated from her family and initially had difficulty making friends. Her Chatham classmates teased her about the loose-fitting tan coat and skirt worn on her first day of class, which was so different from their own ruffled and feminine styles. They made fun of her uninflected Wisconsin accent even as she strained to understand their southern dialect. They thought her long braid severe and old-fashioned compared to their bows and curls. “I started out not having any friends at all,” recalled Georgia, “but I didn’t pay any attention to it.”18
Within a few months, she decided to confront the girls’ cliquish behavior. When a group was huddled whispering on the porch, she came out and “shook hands all around and talked in the friendliest way.”19 Alice Peretta, from Laredo, Texas, had made known her dislike of the newcomer, so Georgia made a bet that she could change the girl’s mind. She earned a friendship that later would lead to a crucial development in her career.
Georgia’s disdain for the entire enterprise was modified by the presence of the principal, Elizabeth May Willis. She was the art teacher and Georgia was her star pupil. Willis, trained at Syracuse University and the Art Students League, recognized that the talented teenager required special handling. She gave Georgia her own table in the spacious studio where she had permission to work by herself after dinner. Willis defended this privilege by telling other students, “When the spirit moves Georgia, she can do more in a day than you can do in a week.”20
After nine months at Chatham, Georgia returned to Williamsburg for summer vacation. Her parents had rented a house on the York River to overcome the sweltering humidity of the town. For furniture, they made tables from boards and sawhorses. Mattresses were laid on the floor. Georgia loved these informal living arrangements. She invited her Chatham classmate, Susan Young, who was astonished to see the O’Keeffes swim in the York River each morning. Raised as a proper southern belle, she could never have entertained such a notion and waited patiently in the shade.
That summer, Georgia made pencil sketches of her sisters, including a full-figure study of young Claudia wit
h a bow in her hair, wearing her Sunday dress and a pair of shiny Mary Janes. Georgia still struggled with the human form even as she was mastering the still life. Her watercolors of purple grapes with oranges show that even at this early stage she felt easy with color.
When she returned to Chatham that fall, Georgia found that her naughty antics as well as her talent as an artist had attracted a handful of fans. After curfew, she taught them to play poker and to break other rules. The school kept an extensive kitchen garden where Georgia helped herself to fresh onions. With two other girls, Georgia captured and killed a chicken from the coop, plucked it in the school’s attic, and cooked it in a roasting pan in the wood-burning heater in the dormitory. They got away with it but “no one asked for the recipe.” She pinned a bow onto the back of a schoolteacher, then made a caricature of her.21 Such pranks were reminiscent of her father, who considered practical jokes the height of good fun.22
Her newfound popularity led her to join classmate Christine McRae Cocke in starting a chapter of the Kappa Delta sorority. Shortly thereafter, the girls criticized Georgia for wanting to control all of the proceedings. She retorted, “When so few people ever think at all, isn’t it all right for me to think for them, and get them to do what I want?”23
At Chatham, more often than not, women were being educated to enhance the prospect of finding a spouse. Georgia baffled classmates with her seeming indifference to boyfriends. She was whippet-thin and something of a tomboy. This trait was perceived as so strange that in the 1905 yearbook, The Mortarboard, Georgia was described as, “A girl who would be different, in habit, style and dress, / A girl who doesn’t give a cent for men—and boys still less.”
Girls’ school dalliances were common enough, but Georgia truly seemed uninterested in either sex. Her family’s moves and economic difficulties had left her in limbo. She had never been socialized with tea parties and dances in the manner of the southern girls. At age eighteen, when her peers were facing the future with optimism and looking for suitable marriage proposals, Georgia was facing an unpredictable future.
Georgia’s fondest memories of Chatham were not of parties or friends but of two paintings that she made while there—a large bunch of lilacs and some ears of red and yellow corn, both in wet-paper method on full-sized sheets of rough Whatman paper. Over seventy years later, she recalled that it was Chatham’s policy to keep what they considered a student’s best piece of work, in her case the painting of corn. It was lost when the institute burned down the year after she graduated.24
Georgia never did demonstrate the academic initiative so evident at Sacred Heart. In fact, she barely graduated. She was required to get a grade of seventy-five on a spelling test, her worst subject. After rigorous studying, she achieved a seventy-six. Her talents in music and art had matured, though. In that year’s Mortarboard, a favorable description was offered: “O is for O’Keeffe, an artist divine. / Her paintings are perfect and drawings are fine.”
Appointed art editor, Georgia illustrated the 1905 yearbook with her own ink drawings and cartoons. Some reflect the influence of the popular illustrator Charles Dana Gibson or turn-of-the-century Symbolism. A pointillist rendering of a graduation motif and the silhouetted horizon of the Chatham school reveal early awareness of Art Nouveau decoration. These bold, black-and-white illustrations are interleaved with her many irreverent caricatures.
As graduation approached, classmates tried to elicit gifts of her drawings and paintings, but Georgia tried to be firm. “I don’t want any of these pictures floating around to haunt me in later years,” she said.25 Nonetheless, her resolve weakened and she gave two drawings to Chatham classmates: a carefully observed still life of two vases and the detailed rendering of a barn, subjects she would reexamine throughout her career. These drawings are precise but stiff compared to the lyricism evident in the delicate watercolor of pansies in a glass bowl that was “coerced” as a gift by Susan Young. These tender pictures are evidence that she had started to overcome her early awkwardness. She was starting to paint flowers with the skill inherited from her two grandmothers.26
As her classmates confessed their matrimonial aspirations, Georgia listened with bemusement and declared her alternative. “I am going to live a different life from the rest of you girls,” she said. “I am going to give up everything for my art.”27 She must have received plenty of encouragement from Elizabeth Willis to make such a bold assertion. Perhaps she had made plans for the fall, but in the meantime, after graduation, Georgia went to stay with her family for the summer.
Despite her parents’ best efforts, it had become apparent that residents of Williamsburg were not willing to patronize the Yankee businessman with the overly familiar manner. Frank maintained his grocery and feed store but started to review the possibility of other careers. He and Ida pretended not to notice that they were still considered interlopers.
In any case, the code of silence observed by the O’Keeffe elders meant that their children remained innocent of the troubles. Georgia took long walks with her siblings, their young friends, and the family pointer, Rega. They trudged across the old Chesapeake and Ohio railroad tracks, past a stream and into the woods where she identified the different flowers and collected chickpeas, explaining how they could be boiled and flavored to taste like chestnuts. The walks came to a halt after one youngster threw cockleburs in her hair. “Georgia was so mad. She wouldn’t take us again,” recalled Carra Winder Dillard.28
Their young neighbor John Henderson recalled that Georgia brought books on her walks. “She was a great reader and she would read to us while we rested,” he said. Henderson remembered Georgia’s mother and sister baking bread, cakes, and pies and devising an ingenious method of whipping cream. “A large jar of cream was kept on the kitchen table,” he said. “It was understood by us children who used the kitchen as a highway that in passing through each one must give the jar a shake.”29
Elizabeth Willis, who knew something of the O’Keeffes’ circumstances, must have written to Georgia’s parents to extol her superior potential. She encouraged them to send the young woman to college, where she could continue studying art. Toward the end of summer, despite their tenuous finances, Georgia’s parents took Willis’s advice. They enrolled their daughter at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Elizabeth Willis, who was a wife and mother as well as a school principal and teacher, was living testimony to the potential of a career in art education, one of the few socially acceptable careers available to women at the turn of the century. Willis’s belief in Georgia’s abilities undoubtedly contributed to the O’Keeffe’s decision to send their daughter to college. Georgia herself was a teenager with only the slightest awareness of the competitive world of galleries, museums, and fine art. She assumed that, like Willis, she would learn to teach art and pursue painting in her spare time.
Ida especially wanted her daughter to have the skills to earn an income now that their own fortunes were dwindling. Then as now, few men and fewer women could support themselves from the sale of their art. Although the Impressionists Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot had earned respect as professional artists, the O’Keeffes primarily wanted their daughter to join the legions of young women who attended art school to become teachers. Georgia enrolled in the Normal program of study to become certified as an art teacher.
The Art Institute was founded in 1879, according to the promotional brochure, for “the founding and maintenance of schools of art and design, the formation and exhibition of collections of objects of art, and the cultivation and extension of the arts of design by any appropriate means.” Although it had a fine reputation as a traditional academy for training artists and teachers, the choice for the O’Keeffes was primarily pragmatic. For one thing, Frank O’Keeffe was familiar with Chicago, having traveled there on business and once bringing home tales of the splendid pavilions erected for the Columbian Exposition of 1893. More important, Georgia could live with Ida’s unmarried sister, Ollie Totto, a stenographer, and
her brother, Charles Totto, who managed a small credit business. She would be appropriately chaperoned and would save money on lodging.
Georgia was queasy with anxiety as she rode the train from tiny Williamsburg to Chicago. When she arrived, in September of 1905, Chicago was a city of two million people, and the intersection of State and Madison Streets was known as “the busiest corner in the world.” One visitor wrote, “New York does not for a moment compare with Chicago in the roar and bustle and bewilderment of its street life.”30
The elevated trains and electric streetcars, cable cars, horse-drawn carriages and early horseless carriages competed with pedestrians for space on the streets. “The sky is of iron, and perpetually growls a rolling thunder,” reported a visitor after standing under the El. “Electric lights are emitting burning sparks, below are wagons of every size and kind, whose approach cannot be heard in the midst of the noise; and the cars, with jangling voice which never ceases, cross and re-cross.”31
The expansion of industry had brought an international population of immigrant laborers. As the wealthy moved out to the suburbs of Lake Forest, Germans, Scandinavians, and Irish moved into the city’s center, where the cost of housing had declined and rents were manageable for people with limited means.
A modest apartment on Indiana Avenue is where Georgia took up residence with the Tottos. Aunt Ollie was respected in her family for having been the only female proofreader at the Milwaukee Sentinel. She had worked for most of her life, and if she entertained few maternal instincts, her independence and discipline left an impression on her niece. In photographs, Ollie looks the part of the homely spinster while Uncle “Charly,” with his huge handlebar mustache, appears rather rakish. Georgia was given the spare room and expected to fend for herself.
Georgia set out each morning in the floor-length dress of the period and wearing her long hair in a girlish braid down the middle of her back. She took the streetcar some twenty blocks across the congested city to the open shoreline of Lake Michigan and Grant Park, where the Art Institute was poised behind its guardians, a pair of larger-than-life lions on pedestals. This great stone palace of culture was built in the classic Beaux-Arts style, with an imposing arched entrance and elaborate moldings carved with the names of the European masters: Teniers, Murillo, Wren, Hobbema, Reynolds, and Gainsborough. Curiously, on either side of the museum entrance, a pair of cow skulls linked by a garland of fruit was carved in stone, and one wonders if O’Keeffe recalled them when pursuing her paintings of skulls some thirty years later.
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