She would use blue ink and pencil on paper to produce this piece which is a landscape composition from a recent river trip in the 1960s. The artwork is deliberately left with an unfinished look, with just some elements of the scene given a complete level of detail. Feint lines of pencil indicate how the rest of the landscape would have continued, had she spent more time developing this relatively simple sketch. The drawing was named Off the End of the Boat on a River Trip and was sold at auction recently in 2020, as part of a larger collection of the artist's work. The sales were made in New York at Sotheby's and covered a number of artworks related to the O'Keeffe's friend Juan Hamilton as well as her husband, Alfred Stieglitz.
The drawing would eventually achieve a price of $32,500 at auction, meeting the lower end of its original valuation. Anything from O'Keeffe's career is now exceptionally valuable, and there are now fewer and fewer pieces available, as most have been snapped up by now. Many see them as long term investments and the recent increased exposure of female art has helped more to discover her work. Many other significant female painters have also been given a greater focus in recent years, though it is important to remember that they were already highly regarded way before this correction in the gender-balance of curated exhibitions.
The artist would mainly gift her sketches or simply keep them within her possessions, with many being left untitled and undated. She may not have given them much value at the time but today they can often be worth somewhere in the region of tens of thousands of dollars. Much will depend on the amount of work involved as well as any connection to some of her most famous themes, such as US cityscapes and still life portraits of flowers and animal bones. Most of the old lots from previous years are still featured online at the likes of Sotheby's and so one can quickly formulate valuations of their own drawings from her career, though final prices achieved are always subject to a series of unpredictable variables from sale day itself.
