Charles Demuth was an American painter who lived in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and helped start the Precisionism art movement. He had a relatively short life due to poor health that may have included childhood injury or polio, and later developed diabetes. Demuth is known for his paintings of buildings and objects that used precise geometrical forms to explore industrialization, as influenced by Cubism and Futurism. His most famous work, "I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold," was inspired by a William Carlos Williams poem and showed the influence of his earlier building paintings through its focus on geometric shapes and multiple perspectives.