She painted White Rose with Larkspur No. 2 in 1927, a year in which enlarged images of flowers, including poppies, petunias, and calla lilies, dominated her output. She later wrote that she felt that she had executed some of her best work in 1927. That year she produced 5 canvases of white roses (only 2 of which included larkspur), all close-ups that vary in their degree of abstraction. White Rose with Larkspur No. 2 is a masterful study of subtle color. O’Keeffe carefully manipulated the range of whites in the rose petals and her tones shift from green to gray to yellow. The flowers themselves are both recognizable and abstracted, and by their very scale O’Keeffe makes the viewer consider them in a new way. As she wrote in 1939, “nobody sees a flower-really … I’ll paint what I see—what the flower is to me but I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it—I will make even....” [http://www.mfa.org/collections/object/white-rose-with-larkspur-no-2-34352]