Georgia O’Keeffe repeatedly painted Pedernal, a distinctive flat-topped mountain visible from her Abiquiu home.
Pedernal rises in northern New Mexico and became one of O’Keeffe’s most recognizable landscape subjects. She simplified its strong horizontal summit and isolated form into compositions that could be highly realistic or nearly abstract. The mountain appears in paintings made across several decades.
O’Keeffe’s attachment to Pedernal was closely connected to her life in New Mexico. She once described the mountain as her private subject, saying that God told her it was hers if she painted it often enough. That remark is frequently quoted, although it is part of the artist’s witty, personal way of describing her relationship with the landscape rather than a literal historical event.
Pedernal should not be confused with Ghost Ranch, another New Mexico location strongly associated with O’Keeffe. Ghost Ranch supplied many of her landscape views, while Pedernal became a particularly persistent single landmark in her imagery.