Georgia Engelhard first appeared in public as an artist when she was six years old. Her uncle, the acclaimed photographer

and impresario Alfred Stieglitz, was enthusiastic about art he deemed “intuitive,” including the work of children, and as such devoted a number of exhibitions at his gallery, 291, to children’s art. The first of these, in 1912, included several works by Engelhard. In 1916, she made her solo debut, Water-Colors and Drawings by Georgia S. Engelhard, of New York: A Child Ten Years Old.

Her exhibition was well received. Charles Caffin, critic for the New York American, credited her pictures with “a depth of emotional expression” and a “reaffirmation of the miracle of instinct.” A New York Times reviewer was equally positive: “Miss Engelhard has the gift of seeing true.” [1]

Engelhard was the daughter of George Engelhard, a lawyer, and Agnes Stieglitz, the photographer’s second sister. The Engelhards lived in New York City but spent summers at the Stieglitz family compound at Lake George. Engelhard was not only a precocious artistic talent but also precociously sensitive to the feelings of others. She recalled being present as a young teen at Stieglitz-led family discussions of Georgia O’Keeffe’s work and of the painter’s acute discomfort during these conversations. [2] Engelhard was also precocious physically, as Stieglitz emphasized in photographs he made of her in the nude at Lake George starting in 1920, when she was fourteen years old (see, e.g., Portrait of Georgia Engelhard, 1922; The Museum of Modern Art). They parallel his series devoted to O’Keeffe, Rebecca Salsbury James, and other women. However, because of Engelhard’s age, some critics have been troubled by these photographs and the erotic feelings they revealed. [3] Whether or not they were purely artistic, Stieglitz’s attentions did not seem to trouble the free-spirited Engelhard. Of these sessions she noted only how hard it was to hold a pose for a long time. [4]

During those summers, Engelhard developed ties to Stieglitz and O’Keeffe that would last their lifetimes. Stieglitz and O’Keeffe made something of a pet of “Georgia Minor” (they also called her “The Kid” and “The Child”). They mentored her creative interests and provided emotional ballast: the summer after quitting Vassar just shy of graduation in 1927, she went to Lake George.

Engelhard was already celebrated as an equestrienne when in 1926 she hiked up Mount Rainier with her father. This was the start of her illustrious career as a mountain climber. Thereafter, her life would be divided between athletic and artistic pursuits. She climbed mountains in the Rockies and the Alps while honing her skills as a painter and then as a photographer at Lake George under O’Keeffe and Stieglitz.

Engelhard worked especially hard at her painting in the late 1920s and early ’30s, emulating O’Keeffe’s style and subjects, sometimes leading to surprisingly similar results. [5] In its palette and its close up, abstract frontality, Englelhard’s Jack in the Pulpit (c. 1927; private collection) mirrors those in O’Keeffe’s famous series. She took on other O’Keeffe subjects, including the New York skyline in homage to O’Keeffe’s images featuring the Shelton residential hotel. One of these, Shelton with Skyscrapers (location unknown) was included in a group show at the Opportunity Gallery in New York in March 1931. At the same time, Engelhard participated in the Society of Independent Artists’ exhibition. Even in the scrum of the

huge Independents show her work stood out; the Times critic praised its “accomplished treatment of design.” [6]

Neither Engelhard’s appropriation of O’Keeffe’s signature themes nor a reviewer’s applause jeopardized the two women’s relationship, as they would between O’Keeffe and her sister Ida. [7] In fact, O’Keeffe and Engelhard seem to have been closest in the early 1930s, Engelhard being one of a very few people the solitary O’Keeffe sought out as a walking and painting companion. In 1932, they drove twice to Canada, where O’Keeffe was drawn to the sober simplicity of the barns and “rather grand crosses,” the “beautiful woods and all the villages very primitive.” Engelhard was so entranced by the fairytale landscape that, per O’Keeffe, “she nearly lost her mind.” [8] It may have been on one of these trips that Engelhard conceived of two paintings of simple churches, similar in subject but different in mood.

For Church (c. 1930; Birmingham Museum of Art), Engelhard chose a format of extreme verticality. The painting is twice as tall as it is wide, and the edges of the canvas tightly frame the sides of the building. She used a blue-black-white palette reminiscent of O’Keeffe’s in Black White and Blue (1930; National Gallery of Art). The image is severely symmetrical, a severity underscored by the sharp outlines of the church, the dramatic one-point perspective, and the minimally visible brushwork. The setting is fantastic and theatrical: behind the church, receding seemingly to infinity, are a succession of mountains lined up like the wings of a stage set.

The White Church, presumably painted at the same time, is nearly as emphatically horizontal as Church is vertical. There is similar reliance on bilateral symmetry and one-point perspective for dramatic effect. Engelhard exchanged the icy palette for a warmer, more verdant color scheme—perhaps paying tribute to the lush terrain of the Gaspé peninsula as O’Keeffe did in Green Mountains, Canada (1932; Art Institute of Chicago). At the same time, mountains, gray and somewhat ominous, fill the far distance. Engelhard’s softer, richer brushwork provides a counterpoint to the discipline of her symmetry and her reliance on crisp outlines, just as the rounded, playful foliage contrasts with the pared-down, geometric shapes of the buildings. The church itself is even simpler than the one in Church—there is no pediment and no pillars flanking the door, the spire is reduced to a flat triangle, and the severe, rectangular windows become gently arch-topped spaces. Church has an Art-Deco-like feeling, while The White Church reflects the deliberately primitive style a number of Engelhard’s contemporaries were adopting during this period.

After the summer of 1932, O’Keeffe and Engelhard spent less time together, as O’Keeffe spent more and more time in New Mexico and Engelhard spent more and more time climbing mountains. Yet Engelhard’s bond with the family, particularly with Stieglitz, remained strong, especially as by the mid- to late thirties she put aside painting to sharpen her skills as a photographer. Stieglitz was willing for her to turn her camera on him. In 1945, American Photography published her essay, “Alfred Stieglitz: Master Photographer,” illustrated with portraits she made of him at Lake George. These capture the strength and, as he aged, the vulnerability of her life-long mentor. They bring to mind the first accolades she received as an artist: “Miss Engelhard has the gift of seeing true.”

— Carol Troyen

[1] Charles H. Caffin, New York American, reprinted in Camera Work, no. 49–50, June 1917, 34; “Art Notes: Water Colors of a 10-Year-Old Girl,” The New York Times, November 23, 1916, 12.

[2] Benita Eisler, O’Keeffe and Stieglitz: An American Romance (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 213.

[3] See Eisler, 267; and Sarah Whitaker Peters, Becoming O’Keeffe (New York: Abbeville Press, 1991), 304.

[4] Engelhard, “Alfred Stieglitz: Master Photographer,” American Photography 39 (April 1945): 9, quoted in Alfred Stieglitz; The Key Set, by Sarah Greenough (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2002), I, 382.

[5] Late in life, O’Keeffe remembered being uncertain about whether she or Engelhard had produced a particular canvas. She consulted Engelhard, who identified the painting as hers [Engelhard’s]. C. S. Merrill, My Weekends with O’Keeffe (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010), 43.

[6] Edward Alden Jewell, “With the Independents,” The New York Times, March 15, 1931, 122.

[7] O’Keeffe’s jealousy of Ida is described in Sue Canterbury, ed., Ida O’Keeffe: Escaping Georgia’s Shadow (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 2018), 62–68.

[8] O’Keeffe to Stieglitz, June 30, 1932, and August 17, 1932, quoted in My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, ed. Sarah Greenough (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 631, 642–43.