These two photographs beautifully trace the grand arch of Charles Sheeler’s artistic career. Taken by the artist himself, the pair reflects defining aspects of Sheeler’s practice as both a painter and as a photographer between about 1912 and 1940.

The photograph at left captures an early work, painted at a moment when Sheeler, like many of his compatriots, remained enraptured with Paul Cézanne and the modernist advances of his Cubist successors. The original oil, now lost, was one of a number of floral studies Sheeler completed between 1912 and 1913. It is possible that this photograph was among those sent to fellow painter Arthur B. Davies, with whom Sheeler discussed his showing at the infamous Armory Show, where three similar floral works were eventually shown. Yet, because of the overpainting, observable across much of the composition, it is more certain that this specific photograph was intended for reproduction in print sometime around the Armory Show itself. Another possibility is that the overpainting was done by Sheeler’s own hand, an attempt to recall and recapitulate an earlier pictorial vocabulary. Regardless, this photograph records a preliminary moment in Sheeler’s aesthetic maturation, one before he arrived at the sharp lines and cool forms of the Precisionist style that would foreground both his painterly and photographic vision throughout 1920s and thirties.