With a long-lost Georgia O’Keeffe landscape heading to auction this month after four decades in a New York closet, one other O’Keeffe has been getting a lot of attention: Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1, the painting that still holds her auction record. Here is what it is, what it sold for, and where it hangs today.
The painting
O’Keeffe painted Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 in 1932. It is a large canvas, about four feet tall, filled almost edge to edge with a single white blossom, its petals framed by dark green leaves. Like her best-known flower paintings, it magnifies its subject so much that the image hovers between botanical study and abstraction.
The flower is datura, known in the American Southwest as jimsonweed: a trumpet-shaped white bloom that opens at dusk and fades by the next morning. Every part of the plant is poisonous. O’Keeffe returned to it again and again, and later grew it outside her home in Abiquiu, New Mexico. In 1936 she painted another, much larger Jimson Weed for the cosmetics entrepreneur Elizabeth Arden, a work now in the collection of Newfields in Indianapolis.
The $44.4 million sale
In November 2014, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe sent Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 to Sotheby’s New York, along with two other works, to raise money for acquisitions. The estimate was $10 million to $15 million. It sold for $44.4 million, roughly three times the high estimate.
The price made it the most expensive work by a woman artist ever sold at auction, a record it held for more than a decade until Frida Kahlo’s El sueño (La cama) sold at Sotheby’s for $54.7 million in November 2025. It remains O’Keeffe’s auction record by a wide margin.
The buyer was later revealed to be Alice Walton, the Walmart heiress and founder of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. The painting now hangs at Crystal Bridges, where it is free to see.
Why it matters now
O’Keeffe’s market is unusually top-heavy. Her large flower paintings from the 1920s and 1930s command the highest prices, while landscapes, bones and smaller works sell for much less. That is why the newly rediscovered Near Abiquiu, New Mexico I, a 1930 landscape found in an East Village closet, is expected to bring around $3 million when it is offered at Christie’s on November 17, a fraction of the 2014 record.
The two pictures make a neat pair. One is the flower that set the high-water mark for her market and for women artists for a decade. The other is an early view of the New Mexico hills that would define the second half of her life. Between them, they cover the two subjects O’Keeffe is most loved for.