Charles Demuth

Charles Demuth (1883–1935) was an American painter from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Franklin and Marshall Academy and went on to study at Drexel University and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. As a young man, he traveled to Paris, where he attended the Académie Colarossi and the Académie Julian and became a part of the avant-garde art movement. Though he was plagued by illness throughout his life, Demuth produced more than one thousand works of art and was able to live on the proceeds of his work.

I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold

Demuth’s painting I Saw the Figure Five in Gold (1928), one of a series of eight abstract portraits of his friends, was inspired by William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Great Figure.”