The work of American painter Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) is, in its pragmatic association with the American scene and its consistently lucid technique, central to the precisionist style. His techniques varied from photographic realism to modified abstraction.

Born in Philadelphia, Charles Sheeler attended the School of Industrial Art (1900-1903) and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1903-1906), studying with the William Merritt Chase. With a fellow student, Morton Schamberg, Sheeler set up a studio in Philadelphia in 1908. In Europe the next year, he and Schamberg were impressed by the elegant formalism of the Italian Renaissance painters. In Paris they experienced some of the ferment of modernism and saw the radical manifestations of Pablo Picasso's and Georges Braque's analytical cubism and the Fauve expressionism of Henri Matisse's painting. After this trip Sheeler devoted himself to working in essentially analytical styles.

In 1910 Sheeler and Schamberg rented a farmhouse in Bucks...