A ram’s skull appears in Georgia O'Keeffe’s 1936 painting Ram's Head, White Hollyhock and Little Hills.
The painting combines a ram’s skull with a white hollyhock and distant New Mexico hills. O'Keeffe frequently collected and painted bones she found in the Southwest, treating them as powerful shapes rather than merely as remnants of animals.
Her bone paintings are often linked to the desert landscape, but they are not all the same. She painted cow skulls, pelvis bones, and other forms in separate works, and the precise object in a title can distinguish one painting from another.
The ram’s skull also shows how O'Keeffe placed sharply defined foreground objects against open skies and distant terrain. That contrast became one of the recognizable visual structures of her New Mexico paintings.