Georgia O'Keeffe bought her house at Ghost Ranch in 1940. Ghost Ranch is a dramatic area in northern New Mexico, near Abiquiu, known for multicolored cliffs, mesas, and open high-desert scenery.
O'Keeffe had first visited New Mexico in 1929 and returned frequently. The region became a major source of subjects for her paintings, including the red and yellow landscape formations that appear in works from the 1930s and later. Ghost Ranch offered her both visual material and a remote place to work.
The house at Ghost Ranch is separate from O'Keeffe's later home in the village of Abiquiu. She acquired the Abiquiu property in 1945 and spent increasing amounts of time there after Alfred Stieglitz died in 1946. Both places are therefore associated with her New Mexico life, but they are not the same residence.
O'Keeffe continued to use Ghost Ranch for years. Its landscape became so closely linked with her public image that visitors sometimes assume all of her New Mexico paintings depict one exact site, although she painted across several areas.