Juan Hamilton was a broke 27-year-old when he first walked into Georgia O’Keeffe’s secluded studio in Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, hoping she might give him a job. It was 1973, and O’Keeffe—whose vibrant, impeccably distilled creations remain a cornerstone of American modernism—had long been renowned for her large-scale paintings of curvaceous, brilliantly coloured flowers and blue-skied desert landscapes. At 85, she still had her feline beauty (famously captured by her late husband, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who caused a furore when he exhibited dozens of nude portraits of her in 1921— while he was married to another woman), but her vision was suffering from macular degeneration. “It was a powerful experience, seeing her that first time,” recalls Hamilton, who had moved to New Mexico from Vermont just months earlier, fleeing a painful divorce and looking for a fresh start. “Right behind her, there was this large, broken Indian pot with a skull inside, a human skull. I remember thinking, ‘Gosh, that’s just how I feel—like a bare skull and a broken pot’.”

O’Keeffe, however, was in no mood for unannounced visitors. Hamilton had accompanied his friend Ray McCall to fix the plumbing at O’Keeffe’s adobe home, and the reclusive artist was annoyed when two men came instead of one. “After we left she called Ray and said, ‘Don’t you ever bring anybody else here again without asking me first’,” says Hamilton, now 70. “So I thought, ‘Well, so much for getting to know her’.”