Georgia O'Keeffe painted her first large-scale flower works in 1924. That year marked an important shift toward the monumental floral compositions that became among her best-known paintings.
O'Keeffe had already developed an abstract vocabulary through charcoal drawings and watercolors. By enlarging flowers so that they filled the canvas, she encouraged viewers to notice shapes, edges, colors, and structures that ordinary scale could conceal.
Her flower paintings are often reduced to a biographical interpretation, especially the claim that they were intentionally symbolic of female anatomy. O'Keeffe rejected that reading and said she painted flowers large because people did not take time to look at them. The 1924 date refers to the beginning of the large-scale flower series, not to her first flower subject of any kind.