What 1935 Georgia O'Keeffe painting shows a ram's skull above white hollyhocks?
Answer
Ram's Head, White Hollyhock-Hills
Answer
Ram's Head, White Hollyhock-Hills
Ram's Head, White Hollyhock-Hills is Georgia O'Keeffe's 1935 painting of a ram's skull above white hollyhocks.
The work combines several motifs associated with O'Keeffe's New Mexico paintings: an animal bone, flowering plants, and the distant desert landscape. She collected bones during walks and used them as subjects because she admired their durable forms and the way they contrasted with the openness of the sky.
The title identifies the painting's main visual elements, while “Hollyhock-Hills” points toward the flowers and Southwestern terrain behind them. O'Keeffe frequently arranged natural objects in unexpected combinations rather than presenting them as ordinary still-life studies.
The work is sometimes mixed up with Cow's Skull: Red, White, and Blue, another famous New Mexico painting. That earlier work uses a cow skull and an American flag-like color scheme, not ram's bone and white hollyhocks.
Source: Wikipedia · fact-checked Oct. 2026