What was Georgia O'Keeffe's first painting of a cow skull?

Georgia O'Keeffe's first painting of a cow skull was Cow's Skull: Red, White, and Blue.

She painted it in 1931 after becoming interested in bones and other desert objects. The work places a bleached cow skull against a stark background and uses the colors named in its title, connecting the object with an unmistakably American visual identity.

O'Keeffe found bones in the New Mexico landscape and carried some back to her homes for use as studio subjects. She treated them as durable natural forms rather than simply as symbols of death. Their shapes allowed her to explore contour, space, and the contrast between fragility and endurance.

This painting is different from Ram's Head, White Hollyhock-Hills, another famous bone painting made in 1935. Cow's Skull: Red, White, and Blue belongs to O'Keeffe's early 1930s skull series.