Works by Charles Demuth

Charles Demuth of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, specialized in watercolour, painting flowers, fruit, acrobats and dancing sailors, and later set his town's buildings in sharp Precisionist planes.

For Amaryllis, of about 1923, he drew the plant in graphite, brushed on colour with care and used a blotter for the pebbly surface. Convalescing with diabetes in Lancaster and physically weak, he was held then to watercolour, less demanding than painting, and to subjects close at hand such as flowers. In Zinnias and a Blue Dish with Lemons the cloth behind breaks into angled grey planes.

In Two Acrobats in Red Tights, of 1917, one performer stands on the upturned feet of another balanced on his hands. Dancing Sailors, from the same year, grew out of his Greenwich Village nights; he kept such homoerotic watercolours private.

In 1919 he began a series on Lancaster's architecture, in oil and tempera rather than watercolour and larger than many of his works. Lancaster, of 1921, stacks a red block, a belfry and a lattice tower under a sky cut into grey beams.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, National Gallery of Art, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, Barnes Foundation. Portrait: Charles Demuth.