Doylestown House—Stairwell
Charles Sheeler American
Not on view
This photograph was made at the Bucks County, Pennsylvania, home that Sheeler shared with fellow painter and photographer Morton Schamberg. The spare geometry of the eighteenth-century Doylestown farmhouse proved an irresistible subject for an artist eager to explore with a camera the radical formal ideas that had impressed him in the paintings of Cézanne, Picasso, and Braque. By lighting the stairwell from below, Sheeler creates a disorienting but orderly work. Elegantly balanced and harmonious, it is a testament to Sheeler's clarity of vision and ability to distill a scene to its essence, a salient feature of the artist's work in all media.