At the time this portrait was made, Alfred Stieglitz was in his mid-50s and had already changed the history of American art. He had been the founder and editor of two important photography journals, Camera Notes and Camera Work. He had established the influential Photo-Secession movement in 1902 and exhibited leading art photography in a major art museum, the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, in 1910. In gallery ‘291’ Stieglitz had presented for the first time in America the most avant-garde European art by artists like Cezanne, Rodin and Picasso prior to the 1913 Armory Show. In 1917, he exhibited and published the first abstract and modernist photography of Paul Strand, thrilling in the moment. With the close of the gallery and the demise of Camera Work, he was poised for a whole new chapter in his life. Stieglitz had seen and exhibited Georgia O’Keeffe’s work a few years prior, but when he invited her in June 1918 to live with him at his family home in Lake George, New York, thus began one of the most fruitful love affairs in American art. Upon their meeting, Stieglitz had found his muse and O’Keeffe had found her champion. Stieglitz began the most prolific period of photographing in his career, almost as if he had to learn how to photograph again in order to discover how to see and portray his new world. He photographed O’Keeffe incessantly, making an extended body of work that acted as a “portrait” of O’Keeffe. He was so taken by her that he wrote to Arthur Dove in 1918, “O’Keeffe is a constant source of wonder to me, like Nature itself” (as quoted in Alexandra Arrowsmith and Thomas West (eds.), Two Lives: Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: A Conversation in Paintings and Photographs, p. 56). Between 1917 and the early 1930s, Stieglitz produced more than three-hundred portraits of O’Keeffe. More than mere portraiture, these images function as visual meditations on intimacy, artistic identity, and the evolving language of modernism. Instead of presenting her in a single likeness, Stieglitz produced a long, expansive series of images capturing O’Keeffe from multiple angles and emotional registers. At the heart of this extended body of work is a large group of nude figurative studies. These photographs frequently omit identifying facial features, instead focusing on O'Keeffe’s hands, torso, legs, breasts, or her full figure. This approach aligned with broader modernist experiments at the time in fragmentation and abstraction, creating synergy between the human body and natural or architectural forms. As Stieglitz and O’Keeffe were both lovers and artistic peers, these images are also imbued with an undeniable sensuality shared between them. The present lot is among the earliest examples of Stieglitz’s legendary series of O’Keeffe, dated to 1918 – their first of nearly thirty-years living together. It is also one of only two known platinum prints of the image, the second belonging to the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.