Born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Charles Demuth spent much of his life in his hometown. In 1905, he enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. In 1907, he made the first of several extended trips to Paris. After completing his studies in 1911, he returned to Lancaster. In late 1912, Demuth returned to Paris for his longest stay, immersing himself in avant-garde circles and studying at the Académie Colarossi and the Académie Julian.

Although Demuth might have painted Mountain Range during a trip to the mountains of Pennsylvania, it is more likely that his watercolor rehearses lessons learned from the work of Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), particularly his paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire in Provence. Cézanne repeatedly painted images of this mountain throughout his lifetime. The flat-topped mountain in Demuth’s watercolor resembles Mont Sainte-Victoire. The watercolor’s strategy of laying down contours in blue wash and building up form with individual brush strokes reflects Demuth’s knowledge of Cézanne’s art, whose 1907 memorial exhibition at the Salon d’Automne in Paris exerted enormous influence on avant-garde artists. Demuth undoubtedly saw that exhibition during his 1907 trip to Paris. The expressive brushwork and vivid colors also reveal Demuth’s awareness of French expressionist artists such as Henri Matisse and André Derain (1880–1954), whose Fauve style emerged around 1905. Demuth would have seen their paintings in Paris as well.

Back in the U.S. in 1915, he spent time in New York, where he was involved in bohemian art circles and produced watercolors of artists and writers in bars, jazz clubs, and bath houses. By 1919, Demuth began to paint the smokestacks, factories, industrial architecture, and machines in hard-edged Precisionist semi-abstractions for which he is best known.

Painted about 1912, Demuth's Mountain Range has a sight measurement of 22.8 x 43.3 centimeters and is the only work by the artist in the collection. It most probabhly depicts an Appalachian scene near Lancaster, Pennsylvania where the artist was born in 1883. His father was a well-to-do businessman and because Demuth's health was always very fragile and because he had been lame since childhood, Demuth was not pressed to enter the family business but was left free to followmhos own pursuits.

Source: DMAC Bulletin,November-December 1980