Though he traveled the world and was a sometime associate of the Gertrude and Leo Stein circle of French modernism in Paris, as well as a close associate of the Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe group in New York City (where he knew Duchamp and Picabia), Charles Demuth (1883-1935) remained close to his Lancaster, Pa, roots; they extended at least as far back as 1770, when a Demuth had opened a tobacco shop there just prior to the Revolutionary War. Born at 109 N Lime St to Augusta and Ferdinand Demuth, the family moved, when Charles was 5 years old, to 118 E King St, next door to the tobacco shop. The King Street house had been occupied by Demuths since 1800. Charles maintained a studio there for the rest of his life. After his death, Augusta maintained the home just as she had for Charles, including the tray and fresh towel each week for his insulin syringe. Today the King Street house, which saw its last Demuth with the death of Augusta in 1943, exists as the Demuth Museum; the tobacco shop, the oldest in America, continues as a business, though no longer under the direct proprietorship of a Demuth. Demuth's health was fragile for his entire life. As a boy he became permanently lame, and in 1918, when he was in his mid-30s, he began to suffer from a "chronic illness." During the summer of 1920, he began having "acute diabetic attacks." In November 1921, Demuth returned from an extended trip to Paris "dying of diabetes," as his long-time friend poet-physician William Carlos Williams put it. He went home to Lancaster where Augusta cared for him while he painted in the studio which overlooked his mother's garden. Augusta's garden, as Williams describes it, was a "small city backyard, not more than twenty-five by thirty feet, surrounded by a high board fence with a rectangular path around it bordering the narrow beds." (The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams. New York, NY: New Directions; 1967.) It was sometime around this time that Demuth painted Spring (cover ), an array of straight lines, planes, and points, the one exception being a line that unwinds across the canvas like a sine wave. Until then Demuth had been painting mostly watercolors, but now, increasingly, he was turning to oils. With the almost rigid, straight, clean edges, one can see the Precisionism in his work that would become almost his sobriquet in later years. Yet there is delicacy in the pastel colors and in the barely perceptible, in some cases, lines and dots. Arranged in overlapping planes, every one of these lines, when extended, becomes a line of force, either meeting at or diverging from some distant point beyond the canvas. Even in the dotted rectangular forms one can see faint pencil marks indicating the direction of the point. In some ways one can see the architecture of Augusta's garden in this painting: rectangular flower beds planted within borders. Or the rectangles could be scraps of fabric left over from what Augusta used to make curtains or slipcovers. In another sense Spring could be a Cubist bouquet of flowers, their organic shapes flattened into planes, not unlike quilting squares. In other ways, one can see Demuth himself in the painting: delicate, fragile, precise, apparently disordered, but at the same time rigorously controlled. According to Williams' description of his friend, Demuth was a small, slight man, "lame, tuberculous," with a chin like Robert Louis Stevenson, and beautiful "long, slender fingers." On the other hand (again from Williams), he was "careless" about his insulin (when it had become available) and died from either a lack of it or an overdose; Williams never could find out. In the final analysis, of course, such speculations are in a sense irrelevant. This is not spring, nor is it a garden; it is a painting, and, according to Demuth himself, paintings are understood through the eyes. They belong to sight, not speculation. "All that can be said before a great painting is ‘Look at that!' . . . at least by those who really see it." (William Murrell. Charles Demuth. New York, NY: Whitney Museum of American Art.) When Demuth's diabetes was diagnosed, insulin was not yet available. It was first used on a Canadian patient in Toronto in January 1922. That spring Demuth became one of the first American patients to receive it, at the Allen Clinic in Morristown, NJ. That gift of Banting and Best gave Demuth another 13 years to paint and gave posterity many of his more famous paintings, including My Egypt (1927), arguably his most famous painting, and his tribute of 1928 to William Carlos Williams, I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold (JAMA cover, January 2, 1981). Not to mention the generations of devotees who still say, when they see a Demuth, "Look at that!" Charles Demuth(1883-1935)Spring c 1921, American. Oil on canvas. 56.2 × 61.3 cm. Courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Ill (http://www.artic.edu); through prior gift of the Albert Kunstadter Family Foundation; photograph © 2000, The Art Institute of Chicago.