In the course of his fifty-year career as a painter and photographer, which spanned the 1910s through the 1950s, Philadelphia-born and -trained Charles Sheeler became widely known as one of America's important modernists. He was among those artists who developed a style known as Precisionism which was characterized by sharp, clear pictorial definitions and contrasts, the pursuit of either extreme realism or Cubist-derived abstraction, and a focus on American regional landscapes or cityscapes. Sheeler was particularly interested in applying the cool rigor of Precisionism to his numerous views of staircases, which he depicted in various mediums, including oil, crayon, gouache, and photography. Extracted from any context, compositionally isolated, reduced to geometric essentials, and abstracted into textureless patterns of line and plane, Sheeler's staircases are typical of his mature architectural subjects in their strict simplification. This drawing of 1924, which represents the stairs to Sheeler's studio at 10 West Eighth Street in New York, is the most abstract and austere of all his staircase works. Ann Percy, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 243-4.