Ida ten Eyck O'Keeffe

Ida ten Eyck O'Keeffe was born on October 23, 1889, in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, the third of the seven O'Keeffe children and two years younger than her sister Georgia. She attended Chatham Episcopal Institute in Virginia and later graduated from the Williamsburg Female Institute in Virginia in 1910; she also took summer drawing courses at the University of Virginia, though the exact year is not confirmed in accessible sources. Her path to a full-time art career was neither direct nor early: she trained as a nurse at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York starting in 1918, and did not return to formal art study until she entered Teachers College at Columbia University in 1929, completing a master's degree in art education around 1931.

She painted steadily through the 1920s and 1930s, developing a distinct visual language built around a recurring lighthouse motif, semi-abstract flower paintings, and, later, landscapes made while living and teaching in Texas. She held her first major solo exhibition at Delphic Studios in New York in 1933. In at least one 1927 group exhibition of women artists curated by her sister at the Opportunity Gallery in New York, she chose to exhibit under the shortened name "Ida ten Eyck," reportedly to avoid the appearance of trading on the O'Keeffe name. The relationship between the two sisters cooled over time, and Ida spent much of her later life apart from Georgia, eventually settling in Southern California.

She died on September 27, 1961, in her early seventies, per Wikipedia's biographical entry; the month and year are corroborated by additional sources, though no primary obituary confirming the exact day was located. Sources place her death in Whittier, California, in Los Angeles County, though at least one biographical source simplifies this to Los Angeles. Secondary, non-primary sources describe the cause as a stroke. One source states her remains rest at Forest Hill Cemetery in Madison, Wisconsin, though this detail is not corroborated elsewhere and should be treated with caution.

Critical attention to Ida ten Eyck O'Keeffe is largely a story of recent rediscovery rather than a long, continuous reception history. For most of the twentieth century she was treated, when discussed at all, as a footnote to her sister's career. That changed with the Dallas Museum of Art's Escaping Georgia's Shadow, described by the museum and by art press as the first solo museum exhibition and the most comprehensive survey of her work to date; the show traveled to the Clark Art Institute in 2019. Coverage around that exhibition, including in Smithsonian Magazine and Fine Art Connoisseur, focused on her formal ambition, particularly the lighthouse variations and the Texas landscapes, and on the biographical strain between the two sisters. No verbatim critical assessment from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for direct quotation here, so none is reproduced.

Ida ten Eyck O'Keeffe's auction market is small and thin, which makes any single sale disproportionately influential. Her documented auction high is Flowers, which sold for USD 302,400 including buyer's premium at Christie's, far above a pre-sale estimate of USD 25,000 to 35,000; the exact sale date and city are not confirmed in accessible sources. Before that result, the previous highest known price was a hammer bid of USD 19,000 for a painting of a tree, with the auction house and date not confirmed. Other documented results include USD 16,000 hammer for Roots (1932) at Barridoff Auctions, against an estimate of USD 8,000 to 12,000, and a reported record price of USD 9,375 at Heritage Auctions, with the specific work and date not specified in accessible listings. Most of her surviving paintings remain in private hands, and public auction supply is limited, so the market has not yet produced a long, continuous price history.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Ida ten Eyck O'Keeffe, and no confirmed current gallery or estate representation. Verification leans on exhibition history, most notably the Dallas Museum of Art and Clark Art Institute survey, and on museum documentation. Because so few works come to auction, prices can move sharply on a single strong result, as the sale of Flowers for USD 302,400 showed, and collectors should treat any individual auction price as a data point rather than a stable trend line. Provenance and correct identification matter more than usual here given the closely related name of her far more famous sister.