Georgia O’Keeffe frequently explored the Southwestern landscape in search of noteworthy views, and in the summer of 1940, she found an inspiring sight: “The places you can go on a horse here always astonish me . . . the most exciting was being on top of a ridge of red hills and seeing the blue flat topped mountains above them—it was very good.” She painted Red Hills with Flowers a month later, depicting bushes of small white flowers growing from the eroded gullies of the red badland, with the blue mesa barely visible to the right. O’Keeffe housed it in a thin strip frame made of a silver metal that she had partially plated with copper to complement the composition’s color scheme.