Like most of Kelly's drawings of plant forms, this austerely elegant linear rendition of four quite different orange-tree leaves on a single stem is located in the center of the sheet, isolated from any context. Kelly drew sections of the work in one continuous line, without lifting the pencil from the sheet. He began making plant drawings in 1949 and continues to make them. They were first shown in a large group in 1969 at the Metropolitan Museum's centennial exhibition "New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940–1970," but although the Museum owns four major abstract paintings, one large sculpture, one collage, and one portrait drawing by Kelly, this is the first of his plant drawings to enter the collection. It was given by the artist on the occasion of the exhibition "Ellsworth Kelly on the Roof," held in summer of 1998 in the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden of the Museum. Kelly has described such drawings as "impersonal observation" of forms in nature. However, the firm handling of penciled contour and rendering of shape without tonal modeling is distinctly his own.