Demuth, Charles (dā`m

th), 1883–1935, American watercolor painter, b. Lancaster, Pa. At the age of 20 he began his art study under William Chase at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In 1907 and again in 1912, Demuth visited Europe. On returning to the United States he began a series of line-and-wash illustrations for works of Zola, Poe, and Henry James and made drawings of vaudeville performers. He is perhaps best known for his beautiful translucent flower and fruit studies in watercolor. Demuth was one of the first painters to draw inspiration from the geometric shapes of machines and modern technology. There are several works by him in the Art Institute, Chicago, and many in the Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, Ohio.

Bibliography

See biography by E. Farnham (1971) and A. L. Eiseman (1986).

Demuth, Charles

(born Nov. 8, 1883, Lancaster, Pa., U.S.—died Oct. 23, 1935, Lancaster) U.S. painter. He studied in Philadelphia and later in Europe. On his return he became an important channel for the transmission of modern European movements into American art. Best known as an exponent of Precisionism, he excelled at watercolour and executed an outstanding series of flowers, circuses, and café scenes. Later he incorporated advertisements and billboard lettering into hard-edged, abstract cityscapes. Among his well-known works are his so-called “poster portraits” such as I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold (1928), a symbolic portrait of the poet William Carlos Williams.

Demuth, Charles (1883–1935) painter; born in Lancaster, Pa. He worked in water colors and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under Thomas Anshutz (1905–08), at the Académie Julian, Paris (1912–14), and lived in New York City. From 1910–14 he painted illustrations for several writers, including Emile Zola and Henry James. Lame and diabetic, he illustrated the joys of physical life, as in Circus Riders (1916), and Acrobats (1919). His later work was a combination of cubism and realism, as in the grain elevators of My Egypt (1927).